We are trying to get Clojure shared over Terracotta, not just specific things but the whole Clojure object space (name spaces, root values, ....) except stuff that needs to remain local (streams, ....).
We take an all or nothing approach here, we would to see many Clojure instances work as a single entity. We are facing a number of issues, one of them being the lack of support by Terracotta of AtomicReference. Terracotta has placed this class in the list of classes they will eventually support but has of 2.7.3 it's still not supported. The Sun AtomicReference does peeks and pokes in the heap using internal routines of the JVM (JNI). Clearly this cannot be done with multiple JVMs, different object heaps, .... Terracotta suggest using the oswego library but since Java 5 has been out, it's in maintenance mode only and integrating another library to the puzzle for that single purpose did not look to us as very efficient. So we created a SharedAtomicReference implementation that uses standard locks to control access to the value with the corresponding Terracotta configuration. We use a factory to decide at run time which implementation to use based on a system property. To preserve the Clojure code base, we implemented an AtomicReference interface and a delegate to the AtomicReference class. The Clojure code uses now interface. This allows us to make progress without disturbing the Clojure code base too much. This has some performance implications that we do not fully understand yet since we need a living Clojure implementation to work with, something we are in the process of creating... what a catch 22 :))) We thought about spending time working on this aspect right now but we prefer to wait for the first alpha release. As for the rest of the Clojure code, we are working on the classes implementing vectors, hash maps, .... to get them shared through terracotta. Our main challenge these days is putting together the terracotta configuration of the internal classes of Clojure that need to be shared. We may hit issues that make some classes non portable. These will require us to implement an alternative. We will use then a slightly different approach, we need only factories to allocate an alternate version or the "local" implementation. The Clojure code already uses interfaces to access the data objects so this will be almost transparent in the code. We prefer to re implement an "distributed" implementation side by side with the original one and easily switch between them to compare behaviour and performance with the same code base. When we have a clearer understanding of how it performs we will look at how to merge this in the code base that will have changed in between. We may be able then to reduce the number of alternate implementations if more where created. The work is in progress, next week is a school break week here so the pace will slow down a bit. We wanted to start earlier on this (before XMas) but we had updates to put in production , client caring to do, ... and other mundane tasks to get the bread and butter on the table. Comments/suggestions are welcomed... Luc On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 12:20 -0800, Paul Stadig wrote: > I've recently done some experimentation with Clojure and Terracotta. > I've detailed my experience at: > > http://paul.stadig.name/2009/02/clojure-terracotta-yeah-baby.html > > and shared my code at: > > http://github.com/pjstadig/terraclojure/tree/master/ > > I'm the first to admit that I'm not an expert in Terracotta. This is > actually my first time working with it. > > I was able to setup a permanent store, and to run a couple of > transactions against some refs shared across multiple JVMs. I ran into > two snags. The first was that Keyword did not implement hashCode, > which was a simple fix. Rich graciously added a hashCode method. :) > > The other was how to point Terracotta to a var from the Java side. I > ended up using a simple Java class to hold on to my refs, since then > it was easy to point Terracotta to the right place. It works just > fine, but I'm not sure if there is a better way to do it. > > I'd be interested in knowing if anyone else has experience to share > about using Terracotta with Clojure. > > > Paul Stadig > > > > -- Luc Préfontaine Off.:(514) 993-0320 Fax.:(514) 993-0325 Armageddon was yesterday, today we have a real problem... --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
