The Terracota product seems very interesting. But as in the last month I worked in defining a scalable new architecture for my company, I wonder if we could use the product. For us, there are two important business goals : - diminish the number of business tests required to validate changes. More specifically, if some business parts are not changed they should not be tested, even the technical details of the implementation changed (for exemple the architectural framework evolved, some common libraries, or new services were added in some jars) - allow different levels of scalability to be specified on the business use cases.

The first goal is much more important than the second.

To achieve this, we plan to split our single EAR into several business domains EARs. Each EAR has his own copy of the domain model components (the architectural framework and the business components, but not the applicative parts). The user continues to benefit from services like SSO, caching, etc. Products like Terracota DSO, Terracota sessions could prove helpful to us. But, in order to achieve business tests independence, we plan to update architectural / business components of EARs at different speeds : so if a business case does not change, its EAR is not updated. Java serialization mechanisms (or XML transforms) allows to communicate different versions of the same class even if they are not the same. Is Terracota able to provide this mechanism : how it handles different versions of classes accros the cluster ?

Thank you in advance.

Florin