William Markito

GemFire 8 added development and management REST APIs, making it really easy to access, perform queries and functions over data. But what about using RESTful API to make two different GemFire systems exchange information ? Well, with the help of event listeners and Asynchronous Event Queues, you can easily build a very scalable solution to keep different systems in sync.

The overall use case represented here is a system with some points of sale (GemFire nodes) that process transactions on a partitioned GemFire region with redundant copies, but that periodically needs to synchronize information with the back office system, where extra processing and analytics may need to happen.

The back office has a partitioned region that’s going to be exposed through REST and where the PoS (Point of sales) nodes are going to send the transaction data.

A load balancer (Apache httpd) in front of GemFire back office servers will handle failover and load balancing from any PoS client to the back office nodes thanks to native Apache modules that provides different options and SLAs if back end systems become unavailable or unresponsive. This also allows the system on the back-end to dynamically scale.

Customers can perform transactions at any point of sale of a Store and still recover or undo in a different node within the store, since the region is partitioned and has a redundant copy, even after a node failure it’s still possible to operate on the remaining nodes. The diagram illustrate two nodes on each system, but that could of course be increased to N as required by and if resources are available.

Note: GemFire provides native WAN integration through Gateways which is the recommended solution for most use cases. This particular scenario explores an alternative solution that may suit specific customer needs such as intermittent connections (3G, mobile…) , multicast distributed systems and or need for HTTP/REST endpoints.

In the next sections, there will be a sample implementation of such scenario running on a single node, using Apache HTTP server, JDK 7 and GemFire 8 on top of OSX. The complete source code is available on GitHub.
Continue reading “Integrating GemFire systems over WAN using REST”