Ehcache Joins Terracotta
These are exciting times for developers. Two of the technology leaders in the Java world have joined their forces: one of the best Java caching solutions, Ehcache, has been bought by Terracotta, presumably the best JVM grid scaling solution today.
Two that fit
Not only that the technology of both partners complement in an outstanding way−a standards caching solution on a standards grid framework−it is also the commitment to open source software from both of them. The only difference is that Terracotta has a well defined business model. Thus it is no surprise that Terracotta is the buyer. And the Terracotta business model−they charge for SLAs and service, not for their software−ensures that there will be a confirmed number of engineers working solely on Ehcache, including Greg Luck, the founder of Ehcache, who now will be able to spend a full working week on the project than about 15 to 16 hours a week before the merger, as he says (see his own blog post).
Who will benefit
So the question is what the acquisition of Ehcache by Terracotta will bring to customers. First of all, customers find themselves lucky not to pay for anything if they don’t want to. Ehcache stays open source, as Terracotta does, but now for both service and SLAs can be purchased. On the technical front we can expect that the frameworks will be merged together far beyond the idea of the byte code injection that makes Terracotta so unique. Ehcache might get an integrated part of Terracotta, which actually makes sense as caching is one major use case on a grid scaling framework.
Ehcache comes with some beautiful features like Web page caching which Terracotta does not provide out of the box. Now you can safely start with a standalone application using Ehcache and when the need arises scale up to terabytes of distributed cache. Developers that already use a distributed Ehcache have now an upgrade path to improve their application performance by moving from RMI or JGroups replication to Terracotta seamlessly.
Conclusion
I have always been and still am an advocate of using the right tool for the right purpose. Now two providers of such tools have joined their efforts to create something new and unique. It is one of this rare opportunities where such a merger really makes sense because both technologies match so beautifully. So let’s see what we developers can make out of it.
August 20th, 2009
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