Thursday, 7 September 2006

Eclipse Plug-in for Point-and-Click Clustering Technology

An Eclipse plug-in for Terracotta DSO, the company’s enterprise-class JVM clustering technology is now available. Bundled with Terracotta DSO, the new plug-in makes Terracotta’s point-and-click clustering functionality available from within the Eclipse IDE. “Eclipse has taken the developer world by storm and become one of the most popular open source IDEs for Java application development,” said Ari Zilka, founder and chief technology officer at Terracotta. “Terracotta DSO already provides plug-in capacity and availability for Java applications running on two or more machines. This plug-in further simplifies the clustering process by automatically generating the necessary configuration files.”

Terracotta DSO (Distributed Shared Objects) is a runtime solution that allows data to be shared across multiple JVMs without the need for proprietary APIs, custom code, databases, or message queues. With Terracotta DSO, objects can be clustered at runtime just by specifying them by name.

Typically, objects and data to be clustered, as well as classes to be instrumented, are manually declared in an XML configuration file. With the Eclipse plug-in, the declaration process is automated via graphical representation of classes and objects, which can be browsed and acted upon within the IDE. Right-clicking objects and selecting Terracotta options from the context menu automatically generates the XML configuration file. The point-and-click automation improves productivity and eliminates iterations.

To facilitate application testing, the Eclipse plug-in lets developers start and stop Terracotta servers and clients from within the Eclipse IDE. In addition, the plug-in provides a more intuitive, developer-friendly XML experience by replacing raw text with graphical representations of sub-declarations within the XML configuration file.