JB439 JBoss Clustering

Course Outline

The following is an outline of the skills and knowledge represented in the training elements of the JB439 JBoss Clustering Course.

Note: Technical content subject to change without notice. Significant changes in course content will generally be available in posted outlines at least two months prior to being implemented in scheduled courses, to allow enrolled students adequate prep time. Reload this page regularly to insure up-to-date information.

1. Overview to JEMS High Availability Services
This module gives you an overview of the JBoss AS platform, how it integrates different JEMS products and where high availability features should be considered for mission-critical deployments. We give an architectural overview to which services benefit from replication, load balancing and fail-over and where we JBoss AS utilizes JEMS products such as JBoss Cache, JGroups and mod_jk.
2. Reliable Multicasting with JGroups
Introduction to JGroups group communication protocol. JGroups is the underlying network level library utilized by most JEMS product to achieve high availability. This module gives you an overview into what JGroups is, and how to use the JGroups API. We introduce you to the concepts of JGroups channels, groups, views, events and messages.
3. JGroups Protocols
This module gives a detailed description of different network protocols available in JGroups. We discuss different protocol implementations for reliable network transport, discovery, group membership, failure detection, message ordering, security and state transfer.
4. Protocol Stacks and Implementation
In this module we discuss the JGroups protocol stack architecture, how different protocols may be assembled together, how they are implemented and finally, how to add your own protocol implementation into JGroups protocol stack.
5. JGroups Building Blocks and Troubleshooting
JGroups building blocks are higher level implementations on top of JGroups protocol stack that help you implement common tasks using JGroups library. In this module we introduce you to the available default implementations, e.g. an RPC invocation implementation across replicated objects using JGroups. We will also look at common issues to troubleshoot when configuring and setting up your network for JGroups.
6. JBoss Cache Overview and API
This module introduces you to JBoss Cache - architecture overview, features and API. You will learn how to manage the tree structure of JBoss Cache, creating and removing nodes and modifying data in the cache. JBoss Cache builds on top of the JGroups library and is a key technology in implementing high availability services in JBoss AS.
7. Cache Loaders and Eviction Policies
Cache loading and eviction policies are critically important to understand how to manage the life cycle of cached data with JBoss Cache. In this section we cover cache loaders which mandate under what policies data is moved from persistent stores into memory cache. Eviction policies allow you to configure and manage the data while in the cache and decide under what conditions data should be evicted back to your datastore.
8. Cache Replication, Transactions and Isolation Levels
This module gets into details on different usage scenarios with JBoss Cache. It will help you to understand the different replication modes with JBoss Cache - asynchronous and synchronous replication - and the implication of replication mode to application performance. We will also learn how to use transactional access to the JBoss Cache, how to set different isolation levels for the cached data, and how the transaction and isolation levels affect the locking performed by JBoss Cache.
9. POJO Cache Overview and API
In this section we look at an advanced version of JBoss Cache (POJO Cache) that utilizes the JBoss AOP framework for efficient implementation of data replication. We will see how the AOP version of JBoss Cache differs in architecture, the changes in the cache API and how POJO Cache manages Java objects inserted into cache differently from other JBoss Cache providers.
10. POJO Cache Implementation
This module goes into deeper detail on JBoss Cache implementation. We see how POJO Cache is leveraged to dynamically introduce interceptors to cache objects, how we can transparently keep track of the exact data changes in POJO Cache, how complex Java objects are automatically mapped into an AOP-enabled cache, the use of collections in cached data sets and more.
11. Web Tier Load Balancing and Failover
In this module we move up one abstraction level and start looking at how high availability features are implemented at JBoss Middleware and J2EE component level. We start with HTTP session replication and see how JBoss Cache is used to implement it. We continue by looking at mod_jk features and how to implement load balancing, hot stand-by and domain clustering when combining Tomcat servlet container with native web servers.
12. EJB Load Balancing and Failover
This module looks into EJB components, recap on the proxy architecture and how we can leverage services on top of JGroups to implement load balancing and failover. We will also learn how to customize and implement your own load balancing policies with EJBs. We will also cover in more detail the naming implementation used with EJBs and how it implements high-availability.
13. JEMS Clustered Services
We look at how to easily replicate service implementations (singletons) in a clustered JBoss AS environment. We discuss master-slave scenarios and how fail-over works with clustered MBeans. We will also study how to enable datasource failover with JBoss AS and discover the implementation details behind HA-JNDI and HA-RMI.