Tangosol has announced the availability of Coherence 2.5, a distributed in-memory data management solution for enterprise Java™ technology applications. The release features a new Coherence Security Framework and adds clustered session management support for the Sun Java™ System Application Server, a key component of the open, pre-integrated Sun Java™ Enterprise System.

Read the Press Release.

Visit the Coherence 2.5 home page

Hi John,

Thanks for posting this! Quite a pleasant surprise to see it on the front page :-)

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: Shared Memories for J2EE Clusters

so does this release come with coffee and donut cache?

That's in the Dunkin Donuts edition. ;-)

The main features in 2.5 are related to:

- security: basically a secure cluster using JAAS

- HTTP session management: Sun ONE, Caucho Resin and NewAtlanta ServletExec support are new, in addition to the servers already supported like IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, Jetty, JBoss and Apache Tomcat .. also we now support WebSphere on the Z

- More performance optimizations for bulk operations .. think of it like "loop unrolling" for the cluster ;-)

- Out-of-the-box ability to access caches from outside the cluster by using the app server's JMS to access the caches remotely.

Next up is our 3.0 release, which should be in pre-release form this month. Lots of Java NIO-based functionality coming ..

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: Shared Memories for J2EE Clusters

Hello Cameron,
              Is the latest version of Coherence 100% Java?
Thanks,
Aswin.

Hi Aswin,

Is the latest version of Coherence 100% Java?

Yes, the latest version of Coherence is 100% pure Java.

We do support C++ and .NET interop through our Intergration Partners.

Later,
Rob Misek
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: It just works.

Thanks Rob I have great respect for the work Tangosol has done. I have another question and I couldnt quite find an answer to it in your website. If say I already a caching solution (either TOPLink or Hibernate or a homegrown one) how will i go about integrating Coherence into my architecture?

For the Hibernate integration, see:

http://www.hibernate.org/132.html

We would be glad to help Oracle add support to TopLink .. just tell your contacts there that you are interested, and that we're interested ;-). Over the next quarter or two, we'll be announcing several more products that are shipping with Coherence support built-in, in addition to the half-dozen JDO vendors, Hibernate, JDX, and others that already ship with out-of-the-box support for Coherence.

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: Shared Memories for J2EE Clusters

Unfortunately I do not have any contacts at Oracle but if i did i would be delighted to pass on your offer. I was enquiring from a generic perspective as to how easy it is to integrate into either a homegrown caching solution or TOPLink ( i worked on this in my last project).
Thanks,
Aswin.

Hi Aswin,

I was enquiring from a generic perspective as to how easy it is to integrate into either a homegrown caching solution or TOPLink ( i worked on this in my last project).

Basically, if the homegrown caching solution that you intend on integrating with Coherence is based on the collections API the integration work will be quite easy. Coherence is based on the java.util.Map interface. Further, the access patterns to the Coherence caches is the same no matter what caching topology you wish to use (i.e. Replicated, Partitioned, Near, Read-Through/Write-Behind, Local, etc). The topology used can be configured on a cache by cache basis in one xml configuration descriptor similar to servlet mappings (complete with wildcard support).

Later,
Rob Misek
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: It just works.

Hi John,
Thanks for posting this! Quite a pleasant surprise to see it on the front page :-)

Peace,Cameron Purdy

It's a very simple relationship, design and create a good product, buy me some beers and there you go, cheap marketing. :-)

All that remains if for you guys to make your peace with the JavaSpaces/Jini people. :-)

Best regards,

-John-
PS: Please send some snow over to London.

Cameron, John,

we are currently using hibernate with Oscache as the cache plugin for both 2nd level cache and query cache.
Although it is working quite well, I wonder how costly (apart licence costs !) it would be to switch from Oscache to Coherence and as well what benefit I could expect ?

Thx,
Laurent.

Platform : WLS 8.1, Solaris 9, Oracle 9, hibernate 2.1.x, Oscache 2.0.x (soon 2.1)

Cameron, John,we are currently using hibernate with Oscache as the cache plugin for both 2nd level cache and query cache.Although it is working quite well, I wonder how costly (apart licence costs !) it would be to switch from Oscache to Coherence and as well what benefit I could expect ?

The Hibernate plug-in for Coherence is at:

hibernate.org/132.html

If the only thing you are caching for is Hibernate, and you have a good working solution today that you've tested and you trust, then I wouldn't suggest changing anything.

On the other hand, Coherence can provide a lot of capabilities that can be quite useful for Hibernate, and for other purposes:

1) Coherence is a coherent cache, which means that instead of throwing away (evicting) data that is changing, it can actually cache the changes.

2) Coherence can cache much larger data sets in memory than any other Java cache solution, because it can aggregate the cache capacities of all of the members of the cluster. For example, if you only want to use 500MB of heap space, and run 10 nodes, you can cache 5GB!

3) Coherence provides locking across the cluster. This means that you can coordinate your data changes to the cache. It also means you can coordinate tasks across the cluster, so only one node will do a particular task at a time. It's also handy for implementing clustered singletons.

4) Coherence provides transactional caching, both optimistic and pessimistic models, and it can plug into the app server's transaction manager using J2CA.

5) Coherence supports agent services .. basically, you can run direct agents to run (and report back sync or async) across the cluster. Ever wanted to collect stats from a set of machines? It's about 10 lines of code with Coherence to do a cluster-wide request/response agent that collects the stats you want, for example.

6) Coherence supports searching through the cache using something other than a key -- basically, you can query the caches based on any attributes of the objects in the cache. Not only that, but you can index those attributes that you search most often for, and it will use parallel query across the cluster to do the search, and it will use the indexes in an adaptive cost-optimized manner.

7) Advanced features, like a JAAS security model, disk overflow, support for multi-terabyte caches, cache triggers, scalability to hundreds and thousands of cluster nodes, etc.

I guess what I'm saying is that you might be fine today with what you are using, or you might find that Coherence offers some clustering and caching capabilities that you don't want to live without ;-)

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: Shared Memories for J2EE Clusters

Cameron, John,we are currently using hibernate with Oscache as the cache plugin for both 2nd level cache and query cache.Although it is working quite well, I wonder how costly (apart licence costs !) it would be to switch from Oscache to Coherence and as well what benefit I could expect ?

Salut Laurent, il-y-a long temps!

I'm not the person to ask, I'll let Cameron take this one, I just use their technology and I know lots of other clients using it. I know it works very well with Hibernate so in theory it should fit quite well in place of OsCache.

A+

-John-

I must add my congrats on this new release.
Have had direct experience with the product and the personnel behind it, and both are outstanding!

Though the product could use more documentation, the experts at Tangosol have produced a win at my current client. From distributed caches, to read-through and write-behind capabilities, to high speed networking, this product represents the richest caching environment available anywhere.

From functionality to performance, this product delivers better than any other product I've seen.

Kirk Sullivan
Execute, Inc.
ksully@iname.com

Hardy congratulations to the TangoSol team on your release of the latest Coherence. I'm happy to report that, like all of the best products that www.incerno.com uses, i haven't even thought about Coherence since deploying the last release. Which means, of course, that the product is doing exactly what i need it to do.

Kudos. And i'm looking forward to exploring this new version's capabilities.

Cheers,
m@

Nice one guys, already deploying it as I type ;)

Matt Youill
betfair.com

Congratulations to the Tangosol team on the new release of Coherence!

During our recent integration of Coherence with JDX OR-Mapper, we found the cache interfaces to be well-throughout and well-designed. Robust implementation. Good to see them continuing to push the envelope.


-- Damodar Periwal
Software Tree, Inc.
Simplify Data integration

I am eagerly anticipating installation of this new release. I have been very impressed with the prior release. We have experienced around a 40% performance improvement in process execution time when we added coherence to our EJB tier.

Kudos.

riley

We have this huge application ( CMPs) and we adopted to use Direct SQL for Reads and use CMP/CMR for creates/updates. This works works so far witout issues. We have used web application context caches/ read only entity beans. But some places , the system is slow and user do complain.

I am looking to improve our performance so I have a few questions

1) Do we have to modify all our Query Code and SLSB Data Facade code to use this ? our view/lists are complicated.

2)How is the maintenance of something like this : what is the impact on System Admins workload ?

3) what is the developer learning curve like ?

4) has anyone retro-fitted this in a existing application and what was the experience like ?

We have this huge application ( CMPs) and we adopted to use Direct SQL for Reads and use CMP/CMR for creates/updates. This works works so far witout issues. We have used web application context caches/ read only entity beans. But some places , the system is slow and user do complain.I am looking to improve our performance so I have a few questions1)

I will do my best. :)

Do we have to modify all our Query Code and SLSB Data Facade code to use this ? our view/lists are complicated.

It depends on how it is currently setup. If you plan on caching the queries then yes. We use BMP so we were able to
simply create base classes that take over ejbLoad and look in the cache for the DTO of the EJB before going to disk for it.

2)How is the maintenance of something like this : what is the impact on System Admins workload ?

Maintenance is pretty non-existant. It is very stable and unless you care about nitpick details of cache performance there is not much to do except to turn it on.

3) what is the developer learning curve like ?

If you have worked with Maps then you already know about 90% of what you need to make it work. The other 10% is configuration and decisions about what type of cache to use. This is of course configurable at runtime so you can change the type of caching you are using without changing your code.

4) has anyone retro-fitted this in a existing application and what was the experience like ?

We did. We initially had some issues with transactions but this turned out to be a few bugs we had :(. Once those were resolved and a few utility and base classes were written it became trivial to convert one of our BMP EJB's into a cacheable EJB.

Good luck