Saturday, March 27, 2010

Hats Off to Terracotta

One of the advantages of Grails is the way that it gives us access to the wealth of proven frameworks in the Java ecosystem. There are Java frameworks and libraries to help with every aspect of application development you could imagine. For many applications, a major requirement that the Java world has worked out quite well is scalability. And when we think of Java and scalability we naturally think of Terracotta.

Of all the open source libraries and frameworks available in the Java ecosystem, Terracotta is one of the most Grails-friendly. In fact, one of Terracotta's projects is built right into Grails (EhCache). Another is one of the most popular Grails plugins (Quartz). What's really cool is that as an organization, Terracotta sees the important role that Grails is playing the Java development space, and is actively working to make their products integrate better with Grails.

Recently, I undertook the task of trying this integration out with the sample app from my book, Grails: A Quick-Start Guide. Other than Quartz, I hadn't used any of their products before, so I was a bit intimidated, but I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is. As with any tool, you can get into more advanced usages that may take more configuration and more work. But the basic integration was a snap!

I've put up the first of a series of blog posts on the GQuick blog, detailing the steps needed to integrate Terracotta's Web Sessions Express clustering tool with the TekDays application from the book. Future posts will cover some of the other products in the Terracotta family.

If you're a Grails developer and haven't taken a look at Terracotta, check 'em out at http://terracotta.org.

Also check out these resources by others in the Grails community who have discovered the synergy of Terracotta and Grails:

http://adhockery.blogspot.com/2010/02/full-page-caching-in-grails-with.html

http://burtbeckwith.com/blog/?p=244

http://ehcache.org/documentation/grails.html

http://alterlabs.com/technologies/java/terracotta-plugin-for-grails/

2 comments:

Greg Luck said...

Dave

I really like the approach Grails is taking: combining the advantages of Rails with Groovy and as you say the power of the existing JVM and libraries.

I and a few others from Terracotta have chatted with the Grails team a few times to see how we could help, with the results that you see.

If anyone has any other integration ideas please contact me gluck AT terracottatech.com

Greg Luck

ArrayList Java said...

completely agree. TeraCotta and EhCache is I guess best of breed open source distributed memory solution.