We've used ObjectGrid to store all of our data so far. This diagram should look pretty familiar by now:
Because we're only using the ObjectGrid APIs, our data is stored in-memory. It is not persisted to disk. If our ObjectGrid servers crash, then our data is in jeopardy (we haven't covered replication yet). One way to get our data into a persistent store is to mark up our classes with some ORM framework like JPA. We can use the JPA API to persist, update, and remove our objects from a database after we perform the same operations on them using the ObjectMap or Entity APIs. The onus is on the application developer to keep both cache and database in sync:
If you take this approach, then all of the effort would be for naught. Websphere eXtreme Scale provides functionality to integrate with an ORM framework, or any data store, through Loaders. A Loader is a BackingMap plugin that tells ObjectGrid how to transform an object into the desired output form. Typically, we'll...