Spring Data

Chapter 14. GemFire: A Distributed Data Grid

vFabric™GemFire® (GemFire) is a commercially licensed data management platform that provides access to data throughout widely distributed architectures. It is available as a standalone product and as a component of the VMware vFabric Suite. This chapter provides an overview of Spring Data GemFire. We’ll begin by introducing GemFire and some basic concepts that are prerequisite to developing with GemFire. Feel free to skip to the section Configuring GemFire with the Spring XML Namespace if you are already familiar with GemFire.

GemFire in a Nutshell

GemFire provides an in-memory data grid that offers extremely high throughput, low latency data access, and scalability. Beyond a distributed cache, GemFire provides advanced features including:

• Event notification

• OQL (Object Query Language) query syntax

• Continuous queries

• Transaction support

• Remote function execution

• WAN communications

• Efficient and portable object serialization (PDX)

• Tools to aid system administrators in managing and configuring the GemFire distributed system

GemFire may be configured to support a number of distributed system topologies and is completely integrated with the Spring Framework. Figure 14-1 shows a typical client server configuration for a production LAN. The locator acts as a broker for the distributed system to support discovery of new member nodes. Client applications use the locator to acquire connections to cache servers. Additionally, server nodes use the ...