ehcache-1.2 released – distributed caching, listeners and more

After 10 months of development, ehcache-1.2 has been released.

Thanks to all the developers who contributed to the release through feature requests, bug reports and patches during the beta program.

The 1.2 release of ehcache has many new features including:

  • Flexible, extensible, high performance distributed caching. The default implementation supports cache discovery via multicast or manual configuration. Updates are delivered either asynchronously or synchronously via custom RMI connections. Additional discovery or delivery schemes can be plugged in by third parties.
  • New FIFO and LFU caching policies in addition to the standard LRU.
  • Introduced CacheManagerEventListener and CacheEventListener interfaces and default implementations.
  • Multiple CacheManagers per virtual machine.
  • Programmatic flushing of application state to persistent caches
  • Significant (up to 7 fold) DiskStore performance increases.
  • API for Objects in addition to Serializable. Non-serializable Objects can use all parts of ehcache except for DiskStore and replication. Two new methods on Element: getObjectValue and getKeyValue are the only API differences between the Serializable and Object APIs.
  • Backward Compatibility with ehcache-1.1. All users of ehcache-1.1 should be able to upgrade to ehcache-1.2.
  • Tested with Hibernate2.1.8 and Hibernate3.1.3, which can utilise all of the new features except for Object API and multiple session factories each using a different ehcache CacheManager. A new net.sf.ehcache.hibernate.EhCacheProvider makes those additional features available to Hibernate-3.1.3. A version of the new provider should make it into the Hibernate3.2 release.
  • Tested with ehcache-constructs.
  • Apache 2.0 license

Enjoy!

By Greg Luck

As Terracotta’s CTO, Greg (@gregrluck) is entrusted with understanding market and technology forces and the business drivers that impact Terracotta’s product innovation and customer success. He helps shape company and technology strategy and designs many of the features in Terracotta’s products. Greg came to Terracotta on the acquisition of the popular caching project Ehcache which he founded in 2003. Prior to joining Terracotta, Greg served as Chief Architect at Australian online travel giant Wotif.com. He also served as a lead consultant for ThoughtWorks on accounts in the United States and Australia, was CIO at Virgin Blue, Tempo Services, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Australian Resorts and spent seven years as a Chartered Accountant in KPMG’s small business and insolvency divisions. He is a regular speaker at conferences and contributor of articles to the technical press.