Ehcache 2.1 Beta - Lots of Stuff, Still Backward Compatible

UPDATE: 2.1 went GA March 21st

The Ehcache dev team is pretty excited to be getting 2.1 beta out for the world to try. This release is focused on 3 primary goals:

• Build on our vision of an application scale continuum from one node to the cloud.
• Improve Ehcache performance both unclustered and clustered.
• Improve Ehcache applicability for both unclustered and clustered.

What did we do in the name of these goals? Good question!

Scale Continuum

In this release we are focused on taking features that had been added for the Terracotta Clustered version of Ehcache and extending them back to the unclustered version.

The following features fall into that category:

• The Explicit Locking Module - This module allows you to acquire and release locks manually for given keys. It required some significant rework in the unclustered stores but this now works just as well unclustered as it does clustered supporting fully coherent operations.
• JTA - In 2.0 of Ehcache we added JTA support when clustered via Terracotta. In 2.1 we extended that functionality to unclustered and have begun the process of performance tuning to go along with its XA compliance.

Performance

While performance wasn't a big focus of this release (It is for the next release) we were able to considerably improve Ehcache "put" performance due to the significant work we did on the disk store and locking architecture. We'll also be spending some time tuning JTA but that work did not make it into the beta.

Applicability

Here we did some considerable work.

• JTA for Hibernate Second Level Cache - We added support for using Ehcache JTA in a second level cache both clustered and unclustered.
• UnlockedReadsView - This is a subtle but important feature. For those who are using a coherent cache but have some part of an application that needs to be able to read at high rates without impacting the rest of the cache this view is a huge help.
• NonStopCache - Useful for guaranteeing that your cache can never stop your application. On a per cache basis an application can avoid holdups caused by problems such as a slow disk in an unclustered cache or a network outage in a clustered one.
• New Coherent methods - We've added useful methods like putIfAbsent and replace to simply and easily work with a clustered or unclustered cache in a fully coherent manner. Together with the explicit locking wrapper much is possible.
• We also added a bunch of tests and bug fixes to the web-cache, an extremely useful tool for making performant web applications.

Summing up...

While still in beta we feel like Ehcache 2.1 is another exciting step for our product family. It adds performance, significant features and is still backward compatible. It continues our vision of an application scale continuum from one node to the cloud without burdening the developer with complexity. One set of frameworks, one application, scale out is added at runtime. We are really excited about this vision and are working tirelessly at extending it to all our users' needs.

Please Download Ehcache 2.1 Beta, put it through it's paces and give us lots of feedback!