I have been asked to come up with the clustering roadmap recently. In doing so, I thought I share with the readers here on the latest for the JBoss Clustering project.

JBoss Clustering as many of you know is easy to configure and is mostly client transparent. As a matter of fact, from the client side, all you need to do is having your jndi lookup pointing to that of HA JNDI (default port 1100 , for istance). If you are new to JBoss Clustering, then the wiki page is the starting point: Clustering wiki. We currently also in the process of updating clustering documentation.

For those of you who are interested in the details, I have created the clustering tasks under Clustering Jira. Detailed high level overview is still to come. But any feedback or contribution is welcome!

Note that the Jira tasks don't have the release schedule since clustering by itself is a cross-cutting concern spanning JGroups, JBossCache, AS, EJB3, Pojo server, etc. Therefore, we have used a timeline-based pseudo schedule to denote what's the latest.

Couple of notable points in the task list are:

1. We plan to use JBossCache for any state replication in the clustering framework. Examples like http session replication, stateful session and entity beans in ejb3 (where the entity bean clustering is supported through Hibernate's second-level cache.) This makes a lot sense in term of modular development as JBossCache is getting popular (just like JBossCache sits on top that of JGroups). Features added in JBossCache can be readily applied to the "application layer" on top. For example, we are developing the overflowing (passivation/activation) feature in JBossCache that will benefit the http session replication and stateful session bean immediately!
2. Since we are using JGroups and JBossCache stacks in various places, a central configuration management is needed. Details of this will come soon.
3. New implementation of http session replication based on JBossCache has been completed in release 3.2.6 and later. Currently I am working toward completion of the fine-grained http session replication where we use JBossCacheAop to perform pojo level replication. This is an exciting development and has the potential to minimize network traffic and performance enhancment. I will describe this in more details once it is fully completed.

Finally, in addition to existing clustering contributors, we currently have 3 Novell's developers on board to work on JBoss Clustering in areas such as farming, HA JNDI, and JBossCache overflowing. The partnership has been working well so far. This can set up a new way of corporate sponsorship of JBoss open-source product development since companies can grow in-house expertise while making the JBoss product itself more robust!