[Spread-users] who's using it and what are they using it for

[Daniel Rall]

"Schwenk, Jeanie" <JSCHWENK at oregon.idt.com> writes:

> I'm researching to determine if spread is a reasonable alternative to
> tibco's rendez-vous message bus.  
>
> What I would like to know from everyone on the list is:
> 	who is using spread
> 	what environment is it being utilized in
> 	what you think of it - the good AND the bad please  
> 	anybody tried the support from Spread Concepts LLC
>
> I work in a semiconductor manufacturing facility that runs 24x7 so
> reliability, uptime and error recovery are the lifeblood of this department.
> We currently use tibco to deliver the messages between numerous hpux
> servers, a couple databases, about 50+xterms, unlimited pcs, and all the
> processes that perform the manufacturing process including spc data
> collection.  Obviously there are numerous entities that use the message bus.

CollabNet is using Spread as a message bus.  We like that the API is
similar to JMS but with support for languages other than Java (we're
using the Java and Perl bindings ATM, but expect to use the Python and
C bindings soon).

Overall, we're quite happy with Spread.  Few technologies these days
effectively avoid a single point of failure.  The only trouble we've
run into has been with clients which process a high volume of messages
being disconnected, but currently assume this is due to the slowness
of Java serialization (used internally by
SpreadMessage.setObject(Serializable)), and work around this by using
something other than a Java Object as the message payload (XML,
character delimited text, etc.).  Single messages representing a batch
operation also do the trick quite well.

Also of note is the fact that Spread is now open source!  This has
been a big help to us, allowing us faster access to fixes relevant to
us (through our own patches, usually), and providing a convenient
place to exchange ideas relevant to message bus technology.