Terracotta announced the availability of Ehcache 2.0 as well as upgrades to its Web sessions clustering product. Ehcache 2.0, is an open source product. It is said to deliver enterprise-class capabilities without requiring application changes. This release brings instant scale to Java applications.

For any organization using or considering Ehcache to support its application, this release provides a number of new features that simplify development effort, testing and scale-out, such as an express mode that easily clusters application data via configuration changes, whether it is in Hibernate, a distributed cache, or session objects. Other enhancements in this release include a series of enterprise features that better integrate Ehcache with the database, such as JTA for transactions, and data write-behind to increase performance while avoiding database bottlenecks.

Ehcache provides a simple caching API for building high-performance data caches, and serves as a plug-in cache for Hibernate, the object/relational persistence and query service. The Ehcache 2.0 enhancements will further entrench it as the de facto caching industry standard for maximizing application throughput and performance and eliminating database bottlenecks.

Meanwhile, Terracotta Web Sessions provides fully-coherent, highly available and durable Web session clustering that is easier to use for a broader range of application stacks.

ificantly expanded share of the development community."

Ehcache 2.0 and Terracotta Express Web Sessions are available for download at http://www.terracotta.org.

I hope I never need to use clustered or distributed cache. Actually, the less cache the better :)

<blockquote>I like this line from Gavin King's book: "...most applications should be designed so that it's possible to achieve acceptable performance without the use of cache."</blockquote>

For single-user applications, perhaps.

This quote does help to explain why Hibernate scales so poorly (and why Oracle sells so many high-end databases :-).

Peace,

Cameron Purdy | Oracle Coherence
http://coherence.oracle.com/

I hope I never need to use clustered or distributed cache. Actually, the less cache the better :)

I like this line from Gavin King's book: "...most applications should be designed so that it's possible to achieve acceptable performance without the use of cache."

Indeed, also all cars should be designed to go from any point in the world to any other location in the planet in less than 2 minutes :-)

Any distributed application that has requirements to scale should properly consider caching from day one, which often isn't so much the technical side of things, but the business side (which means asking the business 'which bits of information would it be acceptable to be out-of-date on certain systems, and what margin of out-of-date-ness would be acceptable in each case')