JGroups on Android phones

Yann Sionneau recently completed a port of JGroups to Android (2.1+). He took the 2.11 version of JGroups and removed classes which weren't available on Android, and changed some code to make JGroups run on Android.

The QR code for a demo app (based on Draw) is available at [1]. Point a QR code scanner to it, download the app and run it on your Android based phone (I ran it on my HTC Desire). Then start Draw on your local computer, connected to the same wifi network as the phone. The instances, whether run on the phone or computers, should find each other and form a cluster.

It was cool to draw some lines on my HTC and see them getting drawn on all cluster instances as well !

[1] http://sionneau.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12%3Atouchsurface-android-app-now-pc-compatible-&catid=3%3Adivers&Itemid=2&lang=en

New distributed locking service in JGroups

I just uploaded JGroups 2.12.0.Beta1, which contains a first version of the new distributed locking service (LockService), which replaces DistributedLockManager.

LockService provides a distributed implementation of java.util.concurrent.lock.Lock. A lock is named and locking granularity is per thread. Here's an example of how to use it:

// lock.xml has to have a locking protocol in it

JChannel ch=new JChannel("/home/bela/lock.xml");

LockService lock_service=new LockService(ch);

Lock lock=lock_service.getLock("mylock");

if(lock.tryLock(2000, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS)) {

    try {

        // access the resource protected by "mylock"

    }

    finally {

        lock.unlock();

    }

}

If "mylock" is locked by a different thread, it doesn't matter whether inside the same JVM, on the same box, or somewhere in the same cluster, then tryLock() will return false after 2 seconds, else it'll return true.

Lock.newCondition() is currently not implemented - if there's a need for this, let us know on one of the JGroups mailing lists and we'll tackle this. If you have a chance to play with LockService, we're also grateful for feedback.

The new locking service is part of 2.12.0.Beta1, which can be downloaded at [1]. Documentation is at [2].
Cheers,


[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/javagroups/files/JGroups/2.12.0.Beta1
[2] http://www.jgroups.org/manual/html/index.html, section 4.6