I’ve been working on a peer-to-peer project for a while. We are trying to build something new and interesting regarding transactions on top of a peer-to-peer network. Hopefully it will be useful =P. I’m not going to talk about that project now; the important point is that I’m aware about how hard setting up and configuring peer-to-peer nodes can be. And making everything work out of the box seamlessly, with an easy to use API at the same time.

A couple of weeks ago, GridGain came to may attention, totally out of the blue. Now imagine my surprise when I decided to test it, following some of their examples. The freaking thing is easy to use and works out of the box. Run a script, a node is running. Do it again, a second one is running. Of course, for more complex scenarios you will have to configure a few things, but the point is that I could starting testing it right away.

The way to build and “deploy” services is ridiculously easy as well. I coded the Hello World example. When running, you start a new node in your main class, and in it you say what tasks you want to execute. GrigGain will then find all other available nodes and, depending on the task implementation, split the jobs between those nodes. Something I liked here is that the task implementation is sent to the other peers in a completely transparent way – you don’t even notice what’s happening.

I won’t dive too much into GridGain here, nor show any code, simply because of another great quality it has: documentation. There is a lot of stuff available, including a lot of easy-to-follow examples. Take a look for yourself. I won’t be using this framework for now, but if I end up needing to implement grid-related stuff, I certainly know where to start looking.

Direct link to the GridGain documentation.