A Comment from Gemstone

Ocassionally, someone will make an important comment to a post I made several months ago. Such is the case now ... Jags from Gemstone replies:

You have hit the nail on the head. At GemStone, we recognized early on that a distributed cache that supports notifications has no choice but to ensure that object change notifications can reliably reach consumers. Else, it pretty much becomes useless.

There are many considerations we took into account:-

Applications are sharing data through a p2p cache and the cache supports dynamic membership - i.e members can come and go at any time. Great from a scalability perspective, but what happens when you have apps connected to the peer cache expecting notifications and a peer node generating the events suddenly departs? In GemFire, we introduced a declarative means to ensure that messages are received by all critical members - each producer or consumer can play one or more roles; A publisher only succeeds if the roles that are required are available. If this interest you, checkout section 3.2 here

http://developer.gemstone.com/display/gfedev/Topologies+and+Architectures+for+Middle-Tier+Caching-

In the scenario you mention - clients connected to a logical cache - we also support asynchronous reliable notifications through in-memory replication of the queues on the cache servers. The challenge here is to ensure in order delivery of events, detecting the failure conditions, automatic client failover to the server managing the secondary queue and avoiding duplicate notifications. And, given that there might be a local cache on the client, the server side can further optimize transmission to the client by merely propagating a object "delta".

One important reason why financial institutions like the whole "caching + messaging" story is because now you enable applications to connect to a distributed object repository that gives pub-sub semantics, but all the contextual data required by the application to make instantenous decisions is available in memory.


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