1

I've just started looking at gemfire. I'm really impressed actually. I'm a little confused by its licensing, there seems to be some indication that some of it is open source? Does anyone have any clear idea? I'm loathed to talk to their sales people. If not, are there any open source alternatives? I can think of a few technologies which offer the same features but not as a whole.

codeape
  • 97,830
  • 24
  • 159
  • 188
Ian
  • 4,885
  • 4
  • 43
  • 65

3 Answers3

2

This question was first posed way back in 2011, but it still seems pertinent, as Gemfire is still referenced in the latest suite of Spring demos on the Spring.io Pivotal site:

"As of the 1.2.0 release, this project, formerly known as Spring GemFire, has been renamed to Spring Data GemFire to reflect that it is now a component of the Spring Data project."

So to use Spring Data, or to at least follow along with the latest "Yummy Noodle Bar" Spring Tutorial suite, it is sort of implied that you need to use the proprietary "Spring Data Gemfire" product for the Order Status solution component (the other two components of the demo being MongoDb for the Menu Item data, and a relational DB like Postgres or MySQL with JPA for the Orders data).

I did some more recent searches and in addition to Hazelcast, I was really only able to come up with one other open source solution which might also fit the bill as a Gemfire alternative :

http://www.gridgain.org/

As for me, I think I'll probably start with Hazelcast and see how that pans out.

In general, I should say that I'm a little disappointed at Pivotal for sneaking a commercial product into their otherwise open source tutorial. It's one thing to lead people to Gemfire with an open source entry level version of the product, but to force developers to sign up for a free trial version of a commercial product that they really have no business purchasing for their development platform in the first place kind of sucks IMHO. Please correct me if I am missing something here.

Dave McLure
  • 27
  • 4
  • Dave, just one correction here... Spring Data GemFire is not a "proprietary" product of Pivotal. Like all Spring projects, it is "Open Source", licensed under ASL 2.0 and freely available from GitHub @ https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-data-gemfire. Also, my plan for Spring Data GemFire will be to support both the commercial offering (Pivotal GemFire) as well as the OSS version (Apache Geode). See https://jira.spring.io/browse/SGF-398 for further details and to track progress. Cheers! – John Blum Apr 20 '15 at 16:32
  • Sounds good! I'll take another look. – Dave McLure Apr 30 '15 at 03:23
2

GemFire has been submitted for incubation within the Apache Software Foundation. Once it has been accepted as an incubation project the source code will be available under an Apache License. Currently you can download, build, and run the source for evaluation purposes at https://wiki.apache.org/incubator/GeodeProposal

Allwin
  • 41
  • 7
Anthony Baker
  • 21
  • 2
2

Unfortunately there are no open-source in-memory data grid solutions. You can check alternative distributed caches like Coherence from Oracle, eXtream scale from IBM, XAP from GigaSpace.

Quick search can bring you to following solutions: Hazelcast - In-Memory Data Grid Cacheonix - In-Memory Data Grid

You can try it. Most probably it is young generation of IMDG and they have not full functionality. But it's free.

BTW: what functionality you want to use? some times IMDG it's just a fix for bad architecture.

Kirils Mensikovs
  • 150
  • 5