Grouper Developers Forum

["GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing" <>]

Hi Steve,

Comments below.

Gary

--On 13 November 2007 10:44 -0500 Steve Edgar 
<>
 wrote:

> Question 1.
>
> Does Grouper support concurrency?  That is, can I have an instance of
> Grouper UI running in Tomcat on one machine, and have another JVM
> running on a different machine, running software which uses the  Grouper
> API, but points to the same db tables as the Grouper UI  instance?
>
> Our current AuthZ solution, called "Permit Server", was developed in  the
> mid-90s, using an in-house protocol and hand rolled GDBM tables.   It is
> a bit short on features, but is super fast and can handle big  groups.  I
> have written a "gateway" which looks like Permit Server on  one side, and
> talks to Grouper on the other.
>
> Currently, this gateway uses web services to talk to Grouper, but I  am
> interested to know if I could instead have this gateway directly  use the
> Grouper API jars.  That would make 2 instances of the Grouper  API
> running concurrently on 2 separate machines:
>
> 1) The UI
> 2) The Gateway
>
> Is this practical?  If so, are there special config settings required  to
> get the needed db locking?

Grouper has no support for the type of concurrency you are talking about 
and there has been a report of an issue at Brown (see 
<https://bugs.internet2.edu/jira/browse/GRP-47>).

The most likely problem area is when two JVMs (or threads in the same JVM?) 
try to modify a group membership at the same time. Other problems could 
occur if an object is deleted in a JVM (thread) and another JVM (thread) 
has an instance of the object.

Does the Gateway perform 'write' operations?



----------------------
GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing