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August 18, 2009
Terracotta and EHCache: A marriage made in Java
posted by ari
I am very pleased to be able to announce that Terracotta and EHCache are now one.
If you were curious what this hash is: ? d7073c02eca990a65c2c4c911fe33b20 ?
It is the Md5 hash of the contract between Terracotta and EHCache leadership that both cements and represents this new day in Enterprise Java scalability.
The rationale
EHCache has massive adoption...
EHCache provides the world-standard caching interface (both de facto and soon, JSR-107) to Java applications; and it is easy to use. EHCache has hundreds of thousands if not millions of production deployments. And EHCache is embedded in many popular products from the Spring framework, to Liferay, to Alfresco, to Documentum, to Hibernate. If you name it, it is likely using EHCache.
Terracotta has a proven open source scalability solution...
Terracotta provides the world's best open source Java clustering and HA platform on which to run Enterprise-class applications. Terracotta is used underneath hundreds of the world's most critical applications. Terracotta's interface in more than 50% of use cases has been EHCache. Basically, developers design applications to use EHCache and use Terracotta's EHCache clustering module to get massive scale and high availability at runtime.
The two together will provide the most seamless path from 1 node up to 100. Instead of having to worry about which version of EHCache Terracotta supports, or if your EHCache integration will work well with Terracotta, EHCache's and Terracotta's users alike can rest assured the two will always work in perfect harmony from today forward.
This makes Terracotta + EHCache the largest vendor in the market focused only on Java scalability and reliability.
What this means for EHCache Users
EHCache users will get a few things:
1. The same Apache 2 license they currently rely on
2. A new hosting environment operated by Terracotta with state-of-the-art forums, source contro, maven infrastructure, etc. all running alongside sourceforge infrastructure that will remain in place
3. a dedicated team of engineers working full-time on EHCache performance and features
4. Direct upgrade path to Terracotta that is seamless and nearly configurationless
5. Enterprise support and training for existing EHCache installations
Terracotta users will get a few things as well:
1. EHCache interfaces will replace Terracotta distributed cache as a single caching interface / standard for Terracotta distributed caching
2. a single-node version of Terracotta that can run on the desktop w/o our server array
3. Full freedom to run on the latest version of EHCache at all times, knowing it works with Terracotta
4. One vendor support structure for their caching interfaces / libraries as well as their scalability / reliability runtime.
Now the fun begins
Next steps together
1. Greg Luck's role will be as CTO of EHCache here at Terracotta, reporting to me
2. We will merge our product roadmaps including, seamless upgrade from 1 EHCache node to 100's as well as adding some new interfaces / APIs around searching / indexing caches, etc.
We now have a very well rounded solution for Enterprise Java applications. The decision about where to keep state has always gone in the database's favor save for the most highly trafficked sites and systems. That's fine by us. Keep the data in the database. Just cache your catalogs, products, and users with EHCache, through Hibernate or directly from JDBC to EHCache by hand. Write your sales orders, trades, matching operations to Terracotta and write-behind to the database or just write-through--both will be fast. And build your conversational state in memory using HTTP Session and Terracotta container clustering or use EHCache directly. With our EHCache distributed cache, our HTTP Session product, and our core DSO platform you can do all 3 in the same application without giving up your database and without sacrificing scale or performance.
The marriage of EHCache and Terracotta: a wedding where you can have your cake and eat it too - scalability and ease of use without having to worry about side effects or impacts.
Here's to Java and the Java Community
--Ari
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Comments
How is it different from the tim-ehcache?
Posted by: Santi at August 18, 2009 12:29 PM
Santi,
Good question. tim-ehcache will now be deprecated. It is a product born out of necessity where Terracotta took it upon ourselves to make EHCache coherent and scalable in a cluster. Now, that product is not necessary as Greg Luck will help us make EHCache Terracotta-friendly w/o impacting its interfaces that applications rely on.
Stay tuned. A clear roadmap will be published in the next couple of weeks.
--Ari
Posted by: ARI ZILKA at August 18, 2009 1:55 PM
oh great
Posted by: aldo at August 18, 2009 2:31 PM
Good news for EHCache. I've used ehcache in the past at aetna, but it was only for a local cache. I don't believe that ehcache is in the same class as coherence, gigaspaces or ibm extreme scale.
I look forward to the future of ehcache.
peter
Posted by: Peter Lin at August 18, 2009 4:01 PM
Wow.. That's really a great move. This seamless integration will bring EhCache users to cluster easily and get the power of Terracotta.
Posted by: Santi at August 19, 2009 8:23 AM