The Server Side recently ran a review of Blitz, "an open source toolkit that sits on Sun's JINI installation, providing services. It's a very
workable default installation for use and experimentation with JINI and
JavaSpaces, a grid-oriented distribution platform."
Blitz uses Berkeley DB Java Edition as a sort of JavaSpaces backing store, much like virtual memory is backed by a paging file.
In an email conversation with Blitz's author, Dan Creswell, he gave several reasons for selecting JE for Blitz:
- Blitz stores chunks of binary, so SQL based approaches are not
appealing..
- Blitz doesn't need querying, but does need transactions and concurrency.
- Blitz doesn't need a separate database process or the implied extra packaging and installation hassles.
- Blitz doesn't need object reference navigation.
- Blitz needs a flat model of named databases that it can split content across and a bunch of indexes for each of those named
databases. - JE allows Blitz to mix blocking and non-blocking and synchronous or no
flush on transactions on the fly - this allows Dan to get exactly the
performance he wants while keeping the appropriate ACID properties -
"very cool". - "The support is fantastic"
