Blitz has taken something of a back seat for a few months whilst I’ve been running around consulting, doing talks/presentations, evangelizing and taking a well-earned holiday.
Over the last couple of months I’ve been working with eTapestry who have some JavaSpaces stuff in their production environment. Amongst other things, we worked through some performance and architectural stuff but a key piece of feedback came in the form of a test which was showing up some problems in Blitz’s caching/indexing code.
I’ve been working on those issues for a while now and it’s lead to a significant simplification of Blitz’s core architecture with some useful performance benefits and a reduction in code-size.
I’ve also added some new features one of which is the ability to run user-specified code at boot-time. The user-code receives a copy of the Blitz proxy just prior to it being published via JoinManager into Jini lookup services. This neatly solves a common set of problems associated with initializing content in a JavaSpace and some other interesting issues. There’s also a much broader range of statistics available via programatic access covering number of dirty entries in cache etc.
I’ve upgraded to the latest version of Db/Java after working closely with Sleepycat on a bug found in a previous release which caused me to do a release of Blitz back-ported to a previous stable version.
At this point, I’m stabilizing the codebase, doing some profiling and some soak tests including the usual thrash tests and memory-leak detection routines. If things go well, I should have a new version out early in January.
Update: And it’s out - on New Years Day and in case you’re wondering, that’s just a happy accident, if I’d attempted to do it deliberately you’d still be waiting! It’s on SourceForge in the usual place and you should consider it alpha for a while - I have thrashed it but it pays to be paranoid…..
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