As some of you may know, integration is one of the strongest points of GridGain. GridGain can natively run on JBoss, WebSphere, WebLogic, TomCat, etc... By natively I mean that GridGain fully reuses all the underneath plumbing of an application server and practically becomes a part of it. For example, if you take integration with JBoss, then you get the following:

• GridGain starts as JBoss service, the same way as any other native component of JBoss.
• GridGain reuses JBoss Communication and Discovery protocols if JBoss is run in HA clustered mode. This means that you don't have to open a single extra network port or introduce any additional network protocols. Whatever JBoss is using - GridGain will also use it.
• GridGain reuses standard JBoss EE deployment model and in addition allows you to dynamically load resources with GridGain Peer Class Loading.
• With its Affinity Load Balancing GridGain allows to partition data stored in JBoss Cache across multiple grid nodes, so you can actually load much more data into cache and scale it much better (the feature JBoss cache does not provide on its own).
• GridGain lets you reuse JBoss AOP for transparent grid-enabling of your code with @Gridify annotation.

The same level of integration you can expect for other application servers and network protocols.

However, recently one of our clients raised a good question - what if you have both, JBoss and WebSphere. Can they be part of the same cluster? Well, if you simply have JBoss use its HA clustering protocol and WebSphere use its own, then you will never create a cluster out of the two. However, you can start JBoss and WebSphere in unclustered modes and have GridGain take care of all the clustering needs. Basically by doing this, you can have JBoss nodes know everything about WAS nodes and easily send computational task from one to another. What's even better, is that with GridGain Peer Class Loading you can have your WAS server automatically load all the classes deployed into JBoss (and vise versa) without any explicit deployment steps.

I should however mention that Peer Class Loading does not apply to resources managed by the container, such as EJBs - if you have an EJB deployed in JBoss, this EJB is fully managed by JBoss and will be absolutely useless to WAS server. However, you can easily execute some computation task from any App Server (even from your EJB) and have this task distributed to all JBoss and WAS servers in your cluster.

Stay tuned for GridGain 2.1 release coming out any day now!