On 26 Jun 2008, at 13:50, Gregg Wonderly wrote:
> htshozawa wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Database abstraction is one of a topic being resolved by OGF. They
>> are
>> doing a really nice job of distributing queries, but I have to say
>> that
>> it's a little off of the business SOA concepts.
>>
>> Food for thought: Can a grid platform be made to be usable as an ESB?
>
> Look at gigaspaces for one example...
In deference to our esteemed moderator I was trying not to pollute
this list with crass commercialism, but Gregg popped my cork (so to
speak). For the record, I am employed by GigaSpaces. However, I
joined GigaSpaces because the software architecture is excellent, I'm
not claiming it's excellent because I work for GigaSpaces.
That being said, who really wants an ESB? No one. Many software
architects and designers want the ability to perform various bits of
E, T, and L on different sources and sinks and to distribute the
results, but an ESB is a means to an end, not the end itself. A "grid
platform", by which I mean both what is commonly and mistakenly called
an "data grid" and a "compute grid" provides a superset of most of the
capabilities of an ESB.
The one functional area in which typical ESBs do not overlap grid
platforms is the ability to transform various object formats. Once
information is mapped from the source formats into a common model
(often an OO model, which is why "data grid" is a misnomer), the
publish/subscribe or queueing transport layer most often provided with
an ESB is pretty limited.
A grid platform is far richer in functionality. Taking GigaSpaces as
a (completely arbitrary) example (solely because Gregg brought it up),
the concept of Space Based Architecture (SBA) addresses the non-
functional requirements of scalability, resiliency, and performance
through the profoundly simple idea of a processing unit. A processing
unit is a lightweight container that co-locates the business logic,
messaging infrastructure, and objects required to execute one or more
instances of an end-to-end business transaction. A processing unit
runs, as might be expected from the name, in a single process, thereby
providing extremely low latency. The processing unit is the unit of
scalability and recovery. This makes high throughput achievable
through the simple expedient of running more instances of the same
processing unit. It also means that, after a failover, both the data
(objects) and business logic are recovered.
That's enough of the sales pitch (http://www.gigaspaces.com). The
answer to your question is that yes, Virginia . . . er . . . Hozawa-
san, you can get all of the benefits, and more, of an ESB from a grid
platform.
Regards,
Patrick
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
----
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
S P Engineering, Inc.
Large scale, mission-critical, distributed OO systems design and
implementation.
(C++, Java, Common Lisp, Jini, middleware, SOA)
