When I got myself a java.net blog I thought I'd have used it to talk about the java technologies I use everyday. Whether it is Spring, XStream or less popular open-sources, the idea was to divulge what I was learning to the benefit of the java community and my own.

Today instead I feel like writing about javaspaces but, not to discuss about some good practice I learnt, but to ask everybody who has worked with it a few questions.

I've been working with javaspaces on and off for the last 12 months and I simply love it.
We have been designing an OLAP solution with javaspaces. We had to deal with large volume of data and high performance expectations and come out with a powerful solution where parallel computations are the core of the architecture.

These days I could not think of solving the same business problem in any other way.

So my questions are, why is that the javaspaces technology is not as popular as I think it should be ? how come there is only one proper open-source implementation (Blitz) and one proper commercial solution (gigaspaces) ? why does it seem that only few patterns have been described to work with spaces ?

Surely I can see that, while the javaspaces API is remarkably concise and simple, it takes some good practice to learn how to design a good distributed solution. The mindset needs to adapt to deal with problems that do not occur in local computation (e.g.: partial failure, network-latency,...). But there must be more than this ?

A colleague of mine told me that is just a "marketing" issue. Sun did a good job in promoting EJB and less of a good job for jini and javaspaces.

Maybe or maybe not... In any case I'd love to hear more...