Distributed Lock Service

Question

Which distributed lock service would you use?

Requirements are:

1. A mutual exclusion (lock) that can be seen from different processes/machines
2. lock...release semantics
3. Automatic lock release after a certain timeout - if lock holder dies, it will automatically be freed after X seconds
4. Java implementation
5. Nice to have: .Net implementation
6. If it's free: Deadlock detection / mitigation
7. Easy deployment, see note below.

I'm not interested in answers like "it can be done over a database", or "it can be done over JavaSpaces" - I know. I'm interested in a ready, out-of-the-box, proven implementation.

Answer 1

A newer kid on the block is hazelcast. I've been playing with it and it is amazingly simple to use and configure.

As far as I can see there shouldn't be any conflict between Gigaspaces and hazelcast as hazelcast doesn't have any dependencies i.e. no jgroups.jar etc

Hazelcast:

1. A mutual exclusion (lock), yep implementation of java.util.concurrency.locks.Lock
2. Automatic lock release after a certain timeout, yep all locks are released if a member leaves the cluster
3. Java implementation, yep
4. Nice to have: .Net implementation, nope is a pure java solution, might be possible to port to j#
5. If it's free: Deadlock detection / mitigation, nope no effort is made my Hazelcast to handle this
6. Easy deployment, it's a single jar with a single config file, deployed as part of your application, no additional processes are required