Gemstone has just announced an alpha version of their concurrent Ruby engine, MagLev, available for download. MagLev is based on Gemstone's Smalltalk virtual machine and supports 64-bit Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris x86 operating systems. There are no plans for 32-bit version of MagLev.
MagLev does not support Rails yet, but so does not Fabio Kung's JMagLev. However, the advantage of MagLev over Fabio's machine is that Gemstone is determined to create an enterprise-class product, and JMagLev was just a demonstration of the power of Terracotta and does not seem to be developed any further. It seems that the next step for Gemstone will be to implement Rails functionality and allow RoR applications to run in a clustered enviornment, just as Grails ones can run on Terracotta.
Showing posts with label ruby. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ruby. Show all posts
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Thursday, November 13, 2008
JMagLev: Terracotta based MagLev for Ruby
In one of my previous posts I wrote about clustering solutions for Ruby. One of them was MagLev, based on Gemstone's Smalltalk virtual machine, the second one was based on Terracotta. The latter solution seems more appealing, since Terracotta is open source, and lets you do some own experiments (like this, or this, or even this). Unfortunately, all solutions I have seen so far (including my own) for JVM based languages other than Java depended on a special library that interfaced Terracotta through com.tc.object.bytecode.ManagerUtil class instances, and were not transparent to the programmer. Until now.
Recently, Fabio Kung took a step further and patched JRuby to behave like MagLev, transparently sharing objects across multiple JRuby runtimes. It seems that MagLev got a strong competitor before it even managed to hit the market. Have a look at the demo, it looks equally impressive to what Avi Bryant from Gemstone showed at RailsConf 2008.
Recently, Fabio Kung took a step further and patched JRuby to behave like MagLev, transparently sharing objects across multiple JRuby runtimes. It seems that MagLev got a strong competitor before it even managed to hit the market. Have a look at the demo, it looks equally impressive to what Avi Bryant from Gemstone showed at RailsConf 2008.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Living in a concurrent world
Erlang is a great platform for writing concurrent, distributed, fault-tolerant applications. But it's not the only one. Some of the popular programming languages also have tools that help developers build concurrent, highly scalable web services.
Java
One of the main sources of Java power is that it has libraries to do almost anything you can imagine. And there are of course libraries that offer various solutions to the scaling out problem, like JMS with JCache or Scala Actors library.
But the real killer application in my opinion is Terracotta. It's an open source clustering solution for Java that works beneath the application level. It uses transactional memory to share objects between applications running on different JVM instances, most notably on different physical machines. Object pool is stored on a master server, which can have multiple passive backups. As a result you receive a clustering solution transparent for the applications you write (you only need to define objects you want to share in Terracotta configuration files). What's more, you can use Terracotta to cluster applications created in languages other than Java, but running on JVM - like JRuby or Scala.
Python
Python programmers can use Disco. It's an open source map-reduce framework written in Erlang that allows you to scale your application easily. Unfortunately, it does not allow neither sharing any data between different application instances (like Terracotta), nor passing messages (like Erlang itself).
Ruby
Ruby looks much better than Python in this aspect. First, there is JRuby, which you can cluster with Terracotta. Second, there is soon-to-come MagLev by Gemstone. It's a Ruby implementation running on a Smalltalk virtual machine, and the first public presentation of MagLev at RailsConf 2008 was quite impressive.
PHP
Not much to say here... You cannot expect much from a language created to produce dynamic HTML pages. You can only rely on external libraries like memcached to store and retrieve objects, but it's by no means an extension to the language itself.
If you know of any other interesting projects providing transparent (or almost transparent) concurrency and distribution to already existing programming languages, you are welcome to tell me about it!
Java
One of the main sources of Java power is that it has libraries to do almost anything you can imagine. And there are of course libraries that offer various solutions to the scaling out problem, like JMS with JCache or Scala Actors library.
But the real killer application in my opinion is Terracotta. It's an open source clustering solution for Java that works beneath the application level. It uses transactional memory to share objects between applications running on different JVM instances, most notably on different physical machines. Object pool is stored on a master server, which can have multiple passive backups. As a result you receive a clustering solution transparent for the applications you write (you only need to define objects you want to share in Terracotta configuration files). What's more, you can use Terracotta to cluster applications created in languages other than Java, but running on JVM - like JRuby or Scala.
Python
Python programmers can use Disco. It's an open source map-reduce framework written in Erlang that allows you to scale your application easily. Unfortunately, it does not allow neither sharing any data between different application instances (like Terracotta), nor passing messages (like Erlang itself).
Ruby
Ruby looks much better than Python in this aspect. First, there is JRuby, which you can cluster with Terracotta. Second, there is soon-to-come MagLev by Gemstone. It's a Ruby implementation running on a Smalltalk virtual machine, and the first public presentation of MagLev at RailsConf 2008 was quite impressive.
PHP
Not much to say here... You cannot expect much from a language created to produce dynamic HTML pages. You can only rely on external libraries like memcached to store and retrieve objects, but it's by no means an extension to the language itself.
If you know of any other interesting projects providing transparent (or almost transparent) concurrency and distribution to already existing programming languages, you are welcome to tell me about it!
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