Prospero

The name Prospero comes form the play The Tempest by William Shakespeare.  The  original Prospero system was written by Chris Chew in Erlang with a little help from me (I wrote a module that parsed XML).

Miranda is a Java port of Prospero with a few changes.  First of all it is written in Java instead of Erlang. It was very difficult to find people who had done functional programming (other than JavaScript) let alone Erlang so I view this as an improvement.

Secondly, Miranda doesn't need RabbitMQ.  This meant that you needed a whole other cluster devoted to RabbitMQ which had to have fast access to your nodes to work.

Finally, Prospero used Mnesia.  In addition to backups (Mnesia had the unfortunate habit of corrupting its files), Mnesia didn't cross AWS availability zones too well.  Miranda is designed to run with nodes in different availability zones.