Lucis upgraded to Lucene 3.6.1

Just a quick note to announce that Lucis has been upgraded to Lucene 3.6.1. In the process, both Lucis and Derquinsej are now deployed to Maven Central using Sonatype OSS Repository Hosting Service, as legacy sync methods are being phased out.

Bocas now built on DEV@cloud by CloudBees

I've set up continuous integration for the Derquinse Bocas using a Jenkins instance kindly provided by CloudBees under its FOSS Program.

Everything has been very easy to set up and has worked perfectly.  You can find the provided instance at https://derquinse.ci.cloudbees.com/.

I'd like to thank CloudBees for providing this service to the Free and Open Source Software community.

"Big Memory" support and new Resources for Derquinse Bocas

Java brought automatic memory management to the mainstream. However, managing the heap is a non-trival task that can require a great amount of effort from the garbage collector. This effort grows with the heap size and may lead to long collection pauses that hurt your system's throughput and response times.

In Bocas, when using a memory-backed repository or a cache, most of the memory consumption comes from the stored values, which are opaque byte streams. If we could get those values out of the Java heap we could use that precious managed space for more value-adding objects.

Enter "big memory" support: starting with version 1.0.4, Bocas supports the use of direct buffers as the backing storage of both memory-backed repositories and caches, using off-heap memory to store the repository values. As the memory-backed repositories are used mainly for testing purposes, this feature is most useful in caches.

This support allows for better utilization of the Java heap, reducing the load for the Java garbage collector. However, take your off-heap caches into account when sizing the heap and planning the memory distribution of your machines.

I would also like to announce new resources for the project:

• A new Google+ Page, used for announcements.
• More documentation is being added to the Project Web Site.
• The General Discussion Google Group.

As a side note, version 1.0.5 has just been released and is already in Maven Central.

A small update on the Gist.GitHub Gadget

The Gadget to embed GitHub Gists in Google Properties, has just received some small updates:

• It is now hosted on a git repository.
• It has a new URL.
• Now uses HTTPS by default.

You can find more information in its home page.

New Resources for Derquinse Commons

One of the goals of open sourcing some project is getting other people to use it. However, code alone is  not enough for that, and some other resources have to be provided so that other people start looking at your code. So, I'm going to try to devote a little more time to providing documentation for the existing codebase than including new features. So for the Derquinse Commons Project, we have:

• A new Project Web Site, still work in progress, that will host the project (non-javadoc) documentation.
• Project announcements will be done through the new Google+ Page for the project.
• A new General Discussion Google group.

As before, the API documentation will continue to be hosted at GitHub Pages and the source code on Google Code.

Announcing Derquinse Bocas

I'd like announce a little project I've been working on lately. It called Bocas and it is a Java and REST API to access key-value repositories with the content-addressed storage constraint, that is, the key must be a hash of the value. In the current implementation, SHA-256 is used as the hash function.

A few releases have been already deployed in Maven Central, and documentation is being built at the project web site. As this site is still short of content, you may find the API documentation useful, above all the main API interface.

The project is hosted on Google Code and has the Apache 2 license.

Stay tuned for more news about this project.

New home for Derquinse Commons API documentation

One of the main issues in Derquinse Commons is the lack of documentation,  including the lack of a stable home for the Javadoc-generated documentation.

From now on, and thanks to the wonderful GitHub pages service, you can find the API docs at http://apis.derquinse.net/derquinse-common.

Non-API docs are still missing, and I hope to be able to write some soon.