XAP 7.1 Preview Version Features Multi-Tenant Environments

Today, GigaSpaces announced a preview release for the next version of it's flagship offering, the eXtreme Application Platform (XAP).  The GigaSpaces developers are putting the finishing touches on the platform before they enter the release candidate stage.  The early access version of XAP 7.1 requires no registration and the GigaSpaces developers are gathering as much feedback as they can from customers.  The new features will include support for multi-tenant environments and better performance, usability, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

For 2010, GigaSpaces plans to put a new focus on SaaS enablement for ISV/OEM partners and consolidating data grid, messaging, and MapReduce services into a single API. They also want to add support for standards such as the JPA and Memcached API. The "build once, run anywhere" XAP middleware platform has already done well in benchmark testing.  It can be used within public and private clouds, data centers, and virtualized environments without a single code change.

The XAP 7.1 has a number of new features for early users to try out.  On-demand distributed dump and log gathering makes it easier to run and manage large clusters by generating a complete snapshot of the system's state whenever you need it.  Elastic data grid support allows users to instantiate a data grid with a single API call and it supports multi-tenant environments.  The data grid capacity can be scaled within on-premises infrastructure or in the cloud.   

Log views in XAP 7.1 are now available within the UI, whereas before they were only available as an API.  The new version now allows queries within nested objects as well.  For example, you can search for all the users who live on a particular street when the street object is an internal field of the user object.  Finally, GigaSpaces has boosted the speed of its data grid - in some cases, up to 400%.  This was achieved through transaction concurrency improvements that reduce contention in the transaction processing area of the code base.

GigaSpaces is currently in the first phase of early access where they release a new milestone every 2-4 weeks.  These releases are targeted at developers and the testing community to gather feedback before advancing to the next stage in the release process.  In the next stage, GigaSpaces will start putting out release candidates.  In this second phase, the APIs and feature list will be frozen, so all suggestions for these things must be submitted before the end of the first phase.  The final phase is the GA release.  The GA release for the last version of the XAP was in the summer of 2009.  

To download the latest 7.1.x version of the eXtreme Application Platform, visit the GigaSpaces Wiki.  GigaSpaces uses Scrum as the model for their development process.  They develop in two-week sprints.