Appistry has updated its Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF) to increase its scalability and reliability and allow older applications to work on the virtual Fabric network.
EAF version 3.5 improves upon previous versions as a framework that allows developers to write scalable applications. It also allows Java and .NET applications to scale out across a number of servers while running as though it were one application on one server.
The Fabric makes the application think it’s running on one computer, and the developer writes applications as though it will run on a single computer. But in execution, the application could be distributed over 100 or more computers.
Automated management makes it possible to push out an update to an application without having to take the servers down. Also, new capacity can be added simply by adding a bare machine. The software recognizes the new hardware, applies the OS, bootstrap software and Fabric software, and it gets added to the server pool.
With 3.5, Appistry makes it considerably easier to deploy objects and applications on the Fabric. Instead of modifying an object to tell the Fabric what to do with state info, now it allows developers to annotate those functions with essentially comments that tell the Fabric how to pass state information into those objects.
This is essentially source-level metadata, where you tag sources and classes with hints of what to do with them. “It’s never been easier for a developer to get an app Fabric-enabled, and the time to market and simplicity benefits are huge,” Sam Charrington, vice president of product management and marketing at Appistry, told internetnews.com.
Appistry EAF 3.5 also features enhanced support for working with data cached in its Fabric Accessible Memory (FAM) in-memory data grid for application state information. Developers can now use a cross-platform map and array data types in FAM.
Version 3.5 also features performance improvements from four to 10 times over previous versions, depending on the function.
Mark Peck, director of product management for Clearent LLC, a credit card transaction processing firm, said EAF gave the start-up firm a chance to get a highly scalable environment up and running and be competitive from the start.
“The performance we’ve seen shows we can scale this up very well,” he told internetnews.com. “For a small startup with a small staff, we can cast a large footprint. We recognized it gave us a reliable and adaptable platform for scaling up our processing very quickly.”