Terracotta acquisition of Ehcache

With terracotta's acquisition of Ehcache, two of the industry's most well-known open source Java cache products came together. Known for providing a JVM-class "Pojo cluster", terracotta can port multithreaded applications running on a single JVM to multiple JVMs without modifying any code, and Ehcache's use is quite extensive and can be seen in countless products and projects. It provides a standard HashMap-style interface similar to that of Oracle coherence. The combination of the two will appear in the vast majority of Java cache products, in view of this, Infoq interviewed Terractta CEO Amit Pandey and Ehcache founder Greg Luck.

For Ehcache users, joining terracotta will have the following benefits:

1. You can continue to use the current Apache 2 protocol.
2. Use a new managed environment managed by terracotta: high-quality forums, source control, MAVEN infrastructure, and more, while those on SourceForge remain the same.
3. A full-time team of excellence dedicated to continuously improving Ehcache performance and features.
4. Add cluster and distributed data upgrade guides for Ehcache-based applications.
5. Enterprise-level support and training for Ehcache installation and configuration.

And for terracotta users:

1. The Ehcache interface will replace the terracotta distributed cache as a separate cache interface, and it will also be the standard for terracotta distributed caches.
2. A single-node version of terracotta can run on the desktop w/o as its server version.
3. Can be easily run on the latest version of the Ehcache.
4. A vendor support structure for its cache interface/library and scalability/reliability/runtime.

Amit Pandey said:

The first is to ensure a

seamless user experience, and secondly to ensure that the integration of ehcache and terracotta is tighter than it is today, for example, by providing a separate Ehcache download with a consistent terracotta back end. Since we've been working on this, you can see it now, but it's a bit of a bad thing for developers. After our efforts, the performance of the integration is better than every product, because we are familiar with all the code.

Amit said: For terracotta, "this acquisition will undoubtedly have a huge impact on coherence." The acquisition of Ehcache would make it easier for terracotta to reach the existing ehcache of projects and products, Terracotta said, "This is a huge number, including most of the world's top 1000 companies", Developers can also build distributed cache-based applications in a variety of ways. Although terracotta is known for providing a transparent Pojo cluster, Amit said: "Transparency is our greatest advantage, but some people criticize that people still have to do the calculations." Greg Luck added:

Ehcache has taken a very simple approach to caching. I think terracotta although simple, but want to use after all still need a certain amount of work. A lot of people like terracotta Pojo way, but most people still don't want to try something new. Terracotta a lot of ideas are very avant-garde, but you know, for the entire Java EE world, simple API model is the most important.

In contrast to coherence, the combination of terracotta and Ehcache has the following advantages:

1. usage rate . If you've built your app on Ehcache, it's now easy to upgrade to distributed.
2. multiple means to use the cache . You can use either a traditional terracotta Pojo cache or an API-based approach.
3. Open Source . Greg Luck said that "coherence is a closed source". For developers, if you want to use coherence you need to ask the senior (such as CTO), while Ehcache and terracotta development can start from the grassroots. This allows developers who want to use coherence to start with Ehcache (a node) and then easily migrate to distributed terracotta.

Greg luck that mergers are a powerful means of staying competitive, even though he has rejected the olive branch of 3 companies over the past few years:

as we saw in last week's report on SpringSource, this is certainly not the strength of the merger, and of course Oracle's acquisition of Sun has given us a lot of inspiration. Caching and distributed caching are important, and there is a great risk that open source projects will be able to emerge successfully. Now there are new competitors, such as Apache Dynamite and memcached, who are either getting stronger or falling down.

For Memcached,greg Luck talked about its integration with Terrracotta eventually improved a Java opponent of Ehcache Server--memcachd, providing a restful API, Can be deployed behind a load balancer to scale across multiple clusters: "Now, each node has a full copy of all the data. This means that you are limited to the processing power of the GC. Our customers are able to run to 20GB, but what if they want to run a 1000GB-size cache? "If that's the case, then Ehcache can't help you." Based on the above points, we can clearly see the future direction of terracotta's development.

The protocol for the Ehcache project is still Apache 2 and can also be accessed through Sourceforge,maven. The acquisition means Greg Luck will be added to terracotta, and Ehcache code's copyright will be incorporated into terracotta INC, just as JBoss acquired hibernate a few years ago. Greg Luck also made a personal statement about the acquisition.

View English text: Ehcache Joins Terracotta

Http://www.infoq.com/cn/news/2009/09/terracotta-buys-ehcache

Terracotta acquisition of Ehcache (EXT)