GigaSpaces XAP 6.6 has been released. XAP, the eXtreme Application Platform, is an application server designed from the ground up to scale out, with applications in caching, distributed processing, messaging, and remote invocations. This release integrates web application support into the container as well as making the application server much easier to use.

This release has many changes, focusing around three core areas: ease of use, alignment with Java EE technologies, and remote service invocations.

Ease of use has been addressed with a revamp of the documentation structure and content, with a new Quick Start Guide and Maven 2 integration. Creating an application that leverages the scalability space-based architecture gives you is now as simple as issuing “mvn os:create” now.

Jetty has been embedded into the platform, so that users can deploy web application archives into a distributed cluster as easily as copying a .war file. There are mechanisms to help manage Jetty configuration in the .war, as well as various integration points into XAP, so you can use multiple approaches to integration depending on your needs.

The Service Virtualization Framework has been released, as well. This framework provides a service proxy through Spring, that gives you the capability to issue synchronous and asynchronous calls, as well as parallel calls, through XAP – which means you can easily create applications that execute Map/Reduce algorithms, for example, with little effort.

GigaSpaces XAP has always had a focus on scalability, but recent releases have focused on integration such that traditional Java EE applications can easily be migrated to a space-based architecture, so they gain scalability without redesign. Spring is the lever used to provide this, so developers can use technology they're familiar with to scale out to the limits of their available hardware, and even beyond, if they have access to external grids like EC2 (See Easily Scale Your Apps on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud http://www.gigaspaces.com/node/888).

GigaSpaces XAP is a commercial product, and has various license options available:

• The premium license, ideal for unlimited cluster sizes
• The standard license, which is ideal for small to medium distributed applications
• A community edition for developers who would like to investigate space-based architecture and capabilities
• An academic license for educational and research facilities
• A startup license, an edition free for startups under $1m revenue/year

For more details and other options, contact sales@gigaspaces.com

See Also: Q&A - Joe Ottinger on What's New in Gigaspaces XAP 6.6