Folks working on development in the clustering area expressed interest in having a location for expressing things that like to see in JBoss AS. Hence, this document.  Members of the community are welcome to express opinions as well.

Although this page was created a few weeks before Christmas, sadly it appears unlikely Santa Claus will deliver the things on this wish list. :-) But if we work together I'm sure we can achieve many of them.

I've divided the page into 4 sections based on the following vague criteria. Don't stress much about what section to put an idea in; it's just a minor attempt at organization and a minor attempt to provoke some thought about what could realistically be done when.

The categories:

Clustering - Next Six Months: idea is clustering related, and you have a general feeling it could be completed in the next 6 months.

Clustering - 12 to 18 Months: idea is clustering related, and you have a general feeling it could be completed in the next 12 to 18 months.

General - Next Six Months: idea is not clustering related, and you have a general feeling it could be completed in the next 6 months.

General - 12 to 18 Months: idea is not clustering related, and you have a general feeling it could be completed in the next 12 to 18 months.

In all cases, the time reference is from mid December 2008, when this page was created.

No one reading this page should regard this as a formal roadmap; it's a wish list. The roadmap is in JIRA.

Clustering - Next Six Months to 12 months

• Cluster management
• Ability to define a cluster on 1 host, then deploy that configuration across all nodes of a cluster
• Ability to start all (or selected) cluster nodes from a central management host
• Ability to stop all (or selected) cluster nodes from a central management host
• Ability to see all nodes of a given cluster graphically (webapp or standalone GUI app)
• Ability to deploy and undeploy an application across all (or selected) cluster nodes
• mod-cluster
• GUI (AJAX based webapp, part of mod-cluster-manager ?) to manage mod-cluster
• See the JBoss instances
• See the config of all JBoss nodes, change it (e.g. change load balance config)
  
• See all deployed, active and inactive webapps in all nodes
• Deploy/undeploy webapps (maybe this GUI and the cluster management GUI should be the same !)
• Start/stop nodes
• In general, we need to have better visibility into the system, a GUI view of it, especially for clustering
• Support
• Built-in tools to get all thread dumps across a cluster, and ship them to support in a standard way ?
• Possibly use Probe and plugins to help
• Galder: tools to test initial setup, e.g. whether IP Multicasting works, spits out best configuration, tests large state transfer etc

Clustering - 12 to 18 Months

• Ease of use: things should work out of the box. If configuration is required, provide a GUI for it and (for experts) the XML way
• Ergonomics
• Try to find the best configuration, either offline or online (at runtime)
• E.g. in JGroups, I'm trying to find the best values for flow control dynamically, e.g. based on message drop rate and free memory
• Reduce configuration options

General - Next Six Months

• [AS] Parallel startup. The ability to start beans that are unrelated on a separate thread.

General - 12 to 18 Months