>Sorry I dont see what Whirlycache is offering over these implementations, furthermore, lesser feature laden java object databases seem to offer many of the features of an object caching system.Has there been any progress on JSR-107?Marc
Well, I have read JSR-107 and I think that both implementations of it and Whirlycache have a place in the world.
In summary, JSR-107 describes a generic object caching service with clustering and disk overflow. In my own testing, disk overflow is a bit of a joke because it starts to be really slow very quickly (of course, this depends on the speed of your disk, among other things!).
Now, some people will obviously need to cache large amounts of data. Whirlycache isn't for them, because we do everything in-memory. And I think that my feeling about this matter specifically is that when you get to the point where you need to do disk overflow, you ought to just use a traditional database and write your cached objects back into that. It will handle the locking concerns for you and will likely provide caching facilities of its own.
Doing a distributed cache is a possibility but no work has been done on this yet. The main concern when you're doing a distributed cache is locking, because the amount of synchronization required across the participating nodes increases with the addition of each new node.
In the meantime, if you want a very fast, configurable in-memory cache, I encourage you to download Whirlycache and ask questions on the list. We will be happy to answer your questions and discuss ideas with anybody.