thejavajar

Data distribution is a pretty cool topic. Recently, I have been working with Hazelcast, which is an open source clustering and data distribution platform for Java. Well, I really like what I have seen so far and I figured why not have some fun with Hazelcast and Groovy.

I started by adding the Hazelcast 1.7.1 jar to $GROOVY_HOME/lib. Hazelcast, at an introductory level, provides distributed implementations of java.util { Queue, List, Set, Map }. I can run a Groovy script on multiple JVM’s and I can share a Map of customers on each instance. For example:

def customersMap = Hazelcast.getMap("customers")

Now, I have an instance of Map and I can add values using Hazelcast’s distributed id generator:

def idGen = Hazelcast.getIdGenerator("customer-ids")
def id = idGen.newId()
customersMap.put(id, "Customer $id")

So, that was pretty simple, right? Here is the entire Groovy script HazelcastGroovynessAdd.groovy:

import com.hazelcast.core.Hazelcast
import com.hazelcast.core.IdGenerator

def customersMap = Hazelcast.getMap("customers")
def idGen = Hazelcast.getIdGenerator("customer-ids")
def id = idGen.newId()
customersMap.put(id, "Customer $id")

I can open up a few different command prompts and enter:

> groovy HazelcastGroovynessAdd.groovy

Now, the customers Map has a few customers in it and our Groovy scripts are still running. Let’s add an com.hazelcast.core.EntryListener to the customers Map so we can detect a com.hazelcast.core.EntryEvent. Here is HazelcastGroovyness.groovy:

import com.hazelcast.core.Hazelcast
import com.hazelcast.core.EntryListener
import com.hazelcast.core.EntryEvent

def listener = [
	entryAdded: { EntryEvent ev ->
		println "key $ev.key was added with value $ev.value to $ev.name"
		Hazelcast.getMap("customers").values().each {
			println it
		}
	},
	entryUpdated: { EntryEvent ev -> },
	entryRemoved: { EntryEvent ev -> },
	entryEvicted: { EntryEvent ev -> }
] as EntryListener

def customersMap = Hazelcast.getMap("customers")
customersMap.addEntryListener(listener, true)

In the above code, we define listener which implements com.hazelcast.core.EntryListener. I now start up HazelcastGroovyness.groovy at a new command prompt(s):

> groovy HazelcastGroovyness.groovy

We can go back to our original HazelcastGroovynessAdd.groovy script and open (re-open) a few more command prompts and run the script that adds customers to the Map. Now in each running instance of HazelcastGroovyness.groovy we see something like:

key 2000001 was added with value Customer 2000001 to c:customers
Customer 2000001
Customer 1000001
Customer 1

Hazelcast is very cool, easy to use technology that provides distributed data with a few lines of code, especially with Groovy. More information can be found at Hazelcast’s website and at the project site at Google Code.