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by larsmak 4446 days ago
Having used HazelCast extensively, and considering making some of my code Sirius-depentant, I can tell you that it is not more advanced. Sirius is basically just a distributed key-value store w/no partitioning, whereas HazelCast has a lot of abstractions built on top of the simpler principle[1]. In fact, it might be a bit overkill in some situations, and that's one of the reasons I will consider Sirius.

[1] http://www.hazelcast.org/docs/3.1/manual/html-single/
2 comments
comcast-jonm 4446 days ago
Our particular reference dataset (TV and movie data) had some application use cases that required custom data structures to get the in-memory performance we wanted. Sirius doesn't provide datastructures per se (and isn't really even a datastore itself)--it provides an eventually-consistent, replicated update stream that you can use to maintain your own datastructures. Having that developer freedom and control over the datastructures was an important design principle.
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bri3d 4446 days ago
Good point!

I agree and I think we were looking at different dimensions: the consistency/partition tolerance story (the "distributed system" bits) seem more thought out in Sirius while the variety of data structures and connectors look more built up in HazelCast.

This may be an issue of documentation as well: Because it's built more "vertically" with a large consumer-facing cross-section (lots of data structures stacked over each other), the HazelCast documentation seems to be very use-oriented while the Sirius documentation focuses on the fundamentals.

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agibsonccc 4446 days ago
Yeah, I definitely use hazelcast for the variety of data structures.

I personally use it for a variety of tasks including distributed locks, a task tracker (think like hadoop) and for phases. If you're curious, here's the impl I'm talking about:

https://github.com/agibsonccc/java-deeplearning/blob/master/...

This is to augment an akka clustering distributed run time.

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