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Spring Boot for GemFire Basics

This guide walks you through setting up your local development environment using VMware GemFire and a Hello, World! client application.

What is VMware GemFire?

VMware GemFire is an enterprise-grade, high-speed, in-memory data and compute grid that serves a variety of use cases. From high-performance, low-latency applications where data must be processed with sub-millisecond delivery times, to caching and key-value stores, GemFire shines as an ultra-fast system of record.

In all GemFire use cases, data remains consistent, secure, and up to date. GemFire can be deployed and replicated across multiple data centers with unlimited scale and extremely fast performance. Plus, it can be deployed on-premises, in the public cloud, in virtual machines, containers, or even orchestrated via Kubernetes.

GemFire is used by customers in many real-world applications (e.g., banking, billing, insurance, inventory, logistics, etc.) to replace NoSQL databases, achieve massive parallel processing at incredibly fast speeds, and supercharge intelligent, modern applications.

Starting VMware GemFire for Local Development

For this getting started locally guide, we will walk through the quickest way to get a GemFire cluster up and running for local development purposes. For full installation instructions, please refer to the GemFire Install documentation.

Download the .tgz file from the Tanzu Network

  1. Download VMware GemFire .tgz from the Tanzu Network.

  2. Unzip or expand the file.

  3. Open a terminal and navigate to the GemFire folder that was unzipped in Step 2.

  4. In the terminal, navigate to the bin folder.

  5. run the following command to start the GemFire SHell (GFSH) ./gfsh

  6. You should see the GemFire Shell start with a version similar to the following image

    GFSH Starting Up

Set Up Your Local Environment

This section will guide you through testing a Hello, World! client app on your local machine to confirm that your local environment is set up correctly.

What You’ll Need

1. Download the Hello, World! Example

  • Clone the Hello, World! app from the VMware GemFire examples repo.

    $ git clone https://github.com/gemfire/spring-for-gemfire-examples.git

  • Update the gradle.properties file with your Pivotal Commercial Maven Repo username and password. For additional instructions, please review the Spring Boot for VMware GemFire Quick Start guide.

2. Start an VMware GemFire Cluster

The following steps will start a small local cluster for the Hello, World! app to connect.

  • In a terminal start the GemFire Shell (gfsh) if it is not currently running

    ./gfsh

  • Start a locator. Locators provide both discovery and load balancing services.

    start locator --name=hello-world-locator

  • Start a server. Servers are primarily used to store data in regions (similar to a table in a relational database.

    start server --name=hello-world-server

  • Once those commands have finished run the list members command

    list members

    You should see an output similar to the following

    Member Count : 2

       Name         | Id
------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
hello-world-locator | 192.168.1.14(hello-world-locator:33323:locator)<ec><v0>:41000 [Coordinator]
hello-world-server  | 192.168.1.14(hello-world-server:33423)<v1>:41001

3. Build and Run the App

Open a different terminal session, navigate to the working directory of spring-for-gemfire-examples/hello-world, and build the application

./gradlew build

then run the application

./gradlew bootRun

We are running a Gradle task so you will most likely see the executing progress bar stop around 75% when the app is up and running.

Now that the application has started, open a browser and go to (http://localhost:8080).

You should see something similar to the below, which represents an artificial time delay simulating a database query.

key: hello

value: 2019-10-01T16:17:51.557 (this will be your current date & time)

time to look up: 3057ms (quantity of time that it took to acquire the key-value pair).

Refresh the page and you should see something similar to

key: hello

value: 2019-10-01T16:17:51.557 (this will be your current date & time)

time to look up: 6ms (quantity of time that it took to acquire the key-value pair).

Note that the time to look up has been significantly reduced. This represents the app getting the information from the cache (VMware GemFire), instead of querying the database.

To confirm that your app is connected to your local cluster, in your gfsh terminal run the following commands

  • List the regions

    list regions

    You should see something similar to this, which shows that a region with the name Hello was created.

    List of regions
---------------
Hello

  • Confirm the web page timestamp has the same value as that stored in your Hello region. Run the gfsh command

    get --key hello --region=/Hello

    You should see something similar to this, where the “Value” listed in your terminal should match the “value” shown on the web page.

    Response from the gfsh command

    Result      : true
Key Class   : java.lang.String
Key         : hello
Value Class : java.lang.String
Value       : "2020-12-08T13:46:47.322"

    Shown on the Page

    key: hello
value: 2020-12-08T13:46:47.322
time to look up: 2ms

4. Stop the App and the VMware GemFire Cluster

  • Stop the *Hello, World! app.

  • Then shutdown the VMware GemFire cluster - this will stop the locator and server, and delete any data you may have in the cluster.

    In your gfsh terminal run the following command

    shutdown --include-locators=true

  • Exit gfsh by typing exit.

Congratulations! Your local environment is set up and ready to develop with.

Learn More

Now that you have successfully set up your local development environment, check out some other guides