Still working away at this one. Blitz now has an integrated experimental version of my nio based transport which can be configured on or off. It currently only boosts, write, take and read performance (roughly 100% faster than normal). I’ve not tested it hard enough to be confident of heavyweight concurrent loads and once you start mixing in transactions, you only get maybe 20% performance boost. I figure I’ll have to extend the transport to support the TransactionParticipant interface as well.

I’ve had some chats with Peter Jones over at SUN and he’s given me some notes and some pointers as to where he sees issues in the current JERI code. He’s not been able to do much in that direction owing to commitments to JDK RMI which is a shame (IMHO) as JERI is way better and ought to be getting the attention. Ah well, maybe one day.

Anyway, the plan is still to go digging through JERI and find the problem - I have a few hunches but I need to run some more tests. My preference is definitely to fix up JERI and then junk the experimental transport (which won’t ever provide much in the way of security etc unless someone else wants to do that work).

Recently, Blitz has been getting some commercial interest which has kept me busy especially when one of my customers hit a deadlock. I’ve written that same customer a remote bootstrapping application that allows them to remotely load their entire JINI application and get it up and running. The real killer is that each downloader can be given a different profile as required by the system admin - this has many uses including testing new builds, value add for specific customers etc.

In between that work, I’ve been developing a JavaSpaces/JINI application rather than an implementation. It makes a nice change to work above the JavaSpaces API rather than under the covers. It allows me to spend time looking at Blitz from a users’ perspective and tweaking things accordingly. Of course, I’m rather an advanced user so it’s only so useful. Thus far, it’s meant a couple of additional configuration variables and a few fixes for the experimental nio transport.

So what is the application? Sorry, it’s remaining cloaked for now. What I will say is that it’s not going to be a pure JavaSpaces/JINI play - you can certainly access it that way but it’s likely going to have a REST-based web interface as well. There’s lots of things you could do with it but I have some specific ideas which will shape it’s direction for a while (no, I’m not telling). At least initially, it won’t be opensource which is something of a departure from the norm, instead it’ll be provided via Lone Crusader in some manner. I’ve already developed a couple of new patterns, not sure how to/if I should make those public. Bit of an experiment, should be interesting……