We have a new re­lease out: 3.5.3 of Trans­ac­tion­sEssen­tials with ma­jor bug fix­es in the con­nec­tion pool­ing as the main fo­cus. This re­lease is rec­om­mend­ed for every­body.

If you have been here re­cent­ly then you will know al­ready: our new site is fi­nal­ly on­line, live for every­one!

The in­tent was to re­vamp our site into a place that per­fect­ly aligns with both our com­mu­ni­ty and our busi­ness goals, and I think we have suc­ceed­ed at do­ing so - but I will let you be the judge of that.

Thanks to every­body in the team for mak­ing this pos­si­ble. To all our vis­i­tors I would say: en­joy!

It has been tak­ing months since we start­ed it, but our new web­site will be on­line very soon now. We are cur­rent­ly do­ing the last bits of work to get it ready...

What makes our new site in­ter­est­ing is our ge­o­graph­i­cal­ly dis­persed team that has been work­ing on it:

• The con­tent and PDF good­ies were writ­ten in Cana­da
• The over­all site de­sign was done in Bel­gium
• The con­tent man­age­ment sup­port - a wiki plat­form - was (and still is) be­ing done in Ger­many

From the in­cep­tion to the fin­ish, this has been a great deal of fun (and work!) and it is a very ex­cit­ing way of do­ing things! This is yet an­oth­er ex­am­ple of how far you can get with a work track­er (like fog­bugz), a wiki and skype;-)

I was at Devoxx (for­mer­ly Javapo­lis) to­day. Be­sides wan­der­ing around in the lob­by (I pre­fer to talk to peo­ple there rather than lis­ten­ing to talks), the only pre­sen­ta­tion I at­tend­ed was on the SpringSource dm Serv­er. Joris Kuipers did a nice job on ex­plain­ing how the OSGi mod­ules work (I think I got it - more or less;-)

To­mor­row (Thurs­day) I will be there too - so if you are around just make sure to say hi!

A lot of the hype in "Ex­treme Trans­ac­tion Pro­cess­ing (XTP)" is fail-over. When Or­a­cle bought Co­her­ence (a Tan­gosol prod­uct), they es­sen­tial­ly got an XTP so­lu­tion for data­base ac­cess.

As Cameron Pur­dy notes here, this now al­lows Or­a­cle to pro­vide a de­gree of XTP failover.

Now guess what: with Atomikos Trans­ac­tion­sEssen­tials you get:

• Trans­ac­tion­al ro­bust­ness for noth­ing, and
• failover for free

How? Just do the fol­low­ing:

1. queue re­quests in JMS
2. process them by a clus­ter of com­pet­ing con­sumer process­es
3. use Atomikos Trans­ac­tion­sEssen­tials to en­sure that each mes­sage is processed ex­act­ly once, with­out du­pli­cates or mes­sage loss

By the se­man­tics of queues, this ar­chi­tec­ture will give you failover. By the se­man­tics of trans­ac­tions, this will give you ex­act­ly once. Since the re­quests can be queued by any source, this is mul­ti­chan­nel. Every­thing is com­mod­i­ty in­fra­struc­ture. This is very easy to scale: just add an­oth­er process.

In sum­ma­ry, this is XTP of the high­est de­gree:-)