Settimana scorsa è morto Steve Jobs. Lo sanno tutti: la notizia era in testa ad ogni quotidiano, ogni notiziario, ogni blog. E non ho potuto fare a meno di provare un certo fastidio nel vedere come la notizia sia stata riportata: farcita di plausi, elogi e lodi per il contributo di Steve e della Apple all’umanità. Ma soffermiamoci un momento a pensare a cosa la Apple (guidata da Steve Jobs)  ha dato al mondo: prodotti belli, rifiniti, facili da usare, che tutti vogliono sfoggiare: il tecno-gadget come oggetto di moda. Da questo punto di vista, concordo sulle lodi sperticate alle capacità di marketing: riuscire a convincere milioni di persone a comprare un prodotto costoso, e a inseguirne le evoluzioni quando invecchia (nello stesso modo in cui invecchiano le mode: molto rapidamente) è da geni.

Ma i prodotti Apple non migliorano il mondo: sono accessibili solo a persone dotate di capacità economica medio-alta, creano un sistema chiuso fatto di connettori non standard, di parti di ricambio non sostituibili in autonomia, di un App Store su cui è possibile pubblicare solo applicazioni che rispettano delle regole non pubbliche dettate  dalla moralità (economica) di Apple.

Le stesse persone che elogiano il fantastico mondo creato da Steve Jobs, sono quelle che si scagliano contro i metodi anti-competitivi di Microsoft, contro i protocolli chiusi e i formati proprietari. Ma una prigione, anche se ha i muri pitturati con paesaggi bellissimi, è pur sempre una prigione.

Per cui elogiamo pure Steve Jobs per il suo genio del marketing. Ma ricordiamoci anche di elogiare le persone che cercano veramente di cambiare il mondo in meglio con la tecnologia, cercando di liberare le informazioni, di renderle accessibili alle persone meno fortunate, di permettere ad ognuno di noi di esprimere la propria opinione liberamente.

Since Friday I’m the proud owner of a Red fedora Hat. Yes, I’ve been hired to work full time on Infinispan and related technologies. I am very happy !!!

I have released version 0.7.1 of my Cassandra Connection Pool. Versions in the 0.7.x series match Cassandra 0.7.x, and therefore require libthrift 0.5.
This version is also being used in the recently released Infinispan 5.0.0.CR1.
The artifacts are now available in Maven Central so you just need to add the following dependency to your pom.xml without any additional bits and pieces:

<dependency>
	<groupId>net.dataforte.cassandra</groupId>
	<artifactId>cassandra-connection-pool</artifactId>
	<version>0.7.1</version>
</dependency>

I also wish to announce that I am currently working on Cassandra Armeria, an abstraction layer for Cassandra’s ever-changing Thrift API, and hope that this will provide the basis for Infinispan’s Cassandra support in the next release cycle (5.1.0).

I have just published Amanuensis on GitHub:

https://github.com/tristantarrant/amanuensis

Amanuensis is a clustered IndexWriter for Infinispan which leverages JGroups’ channel multiplexing to stream index changes from slave nodes to a master node.

To use Amanuensis, add the appropriate dependency to your pom.xml:

<dependencies>
	<dependency>
		<groupId>net.dataforte.infinispan</groupId>
		<artifactId>amanuensis</artifactId>
		<version>0.0.2</version>
	</dependency>
</dependencies>
<repositories>
	<repository>
		<id>dataforte</id>
		<url>http://www.dataforte.net/listing/maven/releases</url>
		<snapshots><enabled>false</enabled></snapshots>
	</repository>
</repositories>

You also need to tell Infinispan to use Amanuensis’ JGroups channel lookup which enables muxed transport of messages.

<global>
		<transport clusterName="cluster">
			<properties>
				<property name="channelLookup" value="net.dataforte.infinispan.amanuensis.backend.jgroups.MuxChannelLookup" />
			</properties>
		</transport>
	</global>

In your code you need to initialize an instance of AmanuensisManager and obtain an InfinispanIndexWriter for each InfinispanDirectory you want to write to as follows:

import net.dataforte.infinispan.amanuensis.AmanuensisManager;
import net.dataforte.infinispan.amanuensis.IndexerException;
import net.dataforte.infinispan.amanuensis.InfinispanIndexWriter;

AmanuensisManager amanuensisManager = new AmanuensisManager(cacheManager);
amanuensisManager.setAnalyzer(analyzer);
InfinispanIndexWriter indexWriter = amanuensisManager.getIndexWriter(directory);

You then invoke methods on the InfinispanIndexWriter from any node and it will send changes to the Infinispan’s coordinator which will apply them to the directory. Index operations can also be batched together:

indexWriter.startBatch();
indexWriter.deleteDocuments(query);
indexWriter.addDocument(doc);
indexWriter.endBatch();

InfinispanIndexWriter is thread safe in that multiple threads can send batches individually.

The project’s site (together with JavaDocs) is available at: http://www.dataforte.net/software/amanuensis/index.html

I have just release version 0.3.5 of my Cassandra Connection Pool.
It contains a couple of bug-fixes when setting configuration properties via the generic set() method and much improved logging: all logs are prefixed with the pool’s name, periodic activity is lowered at trace from debug, and extra logging is done on pool exhaustion.

I recommend upgrading to it.

Get it from my Maven repo.

Cassandra Connection Pool 0.3.3 includes a few bugfixes and some logging (at debug level) for helping to identify problems with validation.

A few days ago I release version 0.3.2 of Cassandra Connection Pool. It fixes a couple of bugs.

I have just released version 0.3.0 of my Cassandra Connection Pool.

New features in this release are:

• automatic host discovery with connection failover
• datasource implementation
• cleanups and bugfixes

I have just added a new project to my github repo: CoheSiVe

From the silly capitalization you can already guess that it’s a CSV library. It differs from other libraries I’ve seen in that it doesn’t attempt to read the whole file in one go, but is uses an event-driven architecture so that your application can decide what to do with each row as it is parsed.

Docs are here: http://www.dataforte.net/software/cohesive/index.html

The Cassandra CacheStore will be included in the Infinispan 4.2, so that people won’t have to wait until 5.0.