Wednesday, 30 October 2013

Getting Started with Hazelcast

In July I wrote a blog introducing erlang to Java developers, highlighting some of the similarities and differences between the two languages. The erlang virtual machine has a number of impressive, built-in features, one of which is that they are location independent and can talk to each other. This means that that data can be synchronised between VMs by writing very few lines of code. This is really good news if you have a networked cluster of servers all doing the same thing.

You could argue that there's something lacking in the JVM if it can't even perform the most basic interprocess communication; however, Java takes the opposite view, it has a basic VM and then layers different services on top as and when required. Whether this is right is a matter of opinion and I'll leave it as a subject for a future blog, because it seems that the Hazelcast Guys have solved the problem of JVMs talking to each other; which is the point of this blog.

So, what is Hazelcast?