ScappShots

I sent a draft of my DICE paper on techniques for updating a distributed dataset to a contact at Terracotta for his comments (Terracotta features prominently in the paper).  He wrote back with two observations.  The first had to do with some clumsiness in my explanation of how Terracotta provides high availability.  His point is well made, and I’ll be revising the draft to reflect his ideas.

The second point will require more research.  I had observed that, although using Terracotta doesn’t require learning any new APIs, it does require strong skills in programming for concurrency.  My contact readily concedes this, but he asked me to consider the impact of Terracotta’s integration modules (TIMs) on the programmer’s learning curve.

As he pointed out, my DICE work focused on using Terracotta with native Java and home-rolled applications.  According to him, the preconfigured integrations of Terracotta and popular third party packages such as Spring and EHCache allow developers who use these third party packages to gain the benefits of Terracotta without having to acknowledge or manage any new concurrency issues.  This is an interesting perspective that I will have to evaluate through experimentation.

If you have experience adopting Terracotta, with or without the TIMs I mentioned, I would like to hear your impressions of the learning curve.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Terracotta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.