Nothing beats good+free software!

good post! I was looking at Hazelcast (now on version 1.7) and it seems like a more mature product with persistence too. Definitely a better fit for my current project than the other (costly) alternatives.
Actually we had tried a while back to extend Ehcache to support all Java Collections and here comes Hazelcast! Got my work cut out!

Roger R

Sorry I called you the wrong name in my earlier post. Apologies for that I picked it up from the blog reference at the top of the page.

Quite a while back some people finally started to realise that databases were completely wrong for particular architectural patterns (the web being the main one). That doesn’t mean that you do not use databases for the web – it is all about how you use a tool rather than the tool itself. Anyway I evaluated a number of caches, techniques and design patterns for using them. I was actually made aware of Memcached by an excellent network specialist that I was lucky enough to briefly work with at the time. Initially I favored a particular Java implementation. Upon evaluation it very quickly became obvious that they are wrong for the job. After evaluating all that was avaliable and placing them in to the context of the potential environment my client and those since would be dealing with in the future then it became more obvious … Java caches are simply not the way to go. They are perfect for, old school, approaches which I still see being implemented at the moment (typical j2ee stacks) but are way out of context within an SOA.

Danga did all that it said it would do. No more, no less. Right tool for the job basically.

Cheers

T

I haven’t made it over to play with Hadoop yet, but I usually find that I’m a fan of Apache projects. If you ever get around to playing with it, I’d love to hear your feedback.

Curious, how did you decide on Danga when implementing your distributed cache?

Cheers,
Shawn

Good post. Thanks for making me aware of this. Hazelcast could become an interesting alternative to the many variations along this same theme. The concept itself is very good and makes perfect sense. I advocated and implemented a “distributed cache” based on Memcached in 2005 for a client. Back then though the thought process was perhaps a little too fresh for other organisations as I struggled to get the concept understood within a more conservative organisation (which to be honest needed it the most).

More recently though there have been a number of alternatives (hadoop + all the other Java specific implementations) and the demand for this type of facility became more obvious when Oracle purchased Coherence. (Databases are too slow so to speak). The approach is not without it’s problems though.

The design pattern for their use however should, at last, start the industry questioning a number of other “advanced” solutions which are somewhat proved wrong by these approaches which in itself could be classified as common sense I suppose.

(NB: I wouldn’t touch the Java implementations).

Keep up the good posts.

Cheers

T