News

JBoss and Sleepycat partner to 'cache in' with persistence

• By Rich Seeley
• September 14, 2004

Marc Fleury, founder and CEO of JBoss, says 'high-end Java developers' will appreciate the significance of integrating JBossCache with Sleepycat's Berkeley DB.

Developers working on embedded systems such as routers and Web applications for e-commerce will understand the performance advantages of having data stored in server memory, he says.

'The applicability of the cache is massive; it's used everywhere,' he tells JDT in a phone interview. 'For example, the Dow Jones index caches the stock quotes so the machines serving the extreme loads the Dow Jones is under have that data locally, so they don't have to go back [to a central database and] waste time.'

In Fleury's view, the key to performance and scalability in e-commerce applications is to avoid remote procedure calls to a database on another server to get a zip code.

'Let's take an example that needs cache and persistence,' he says. 'Most Web sites that do e-commerce need mapping between zip codes and the states to know if the zip code is valid. That is not information that changes very often. So having that data replicated across all the machines readily available without having to go to a Web service is a dramatic speed improvement when you build applications.'

Because RAM for servers is relatively inexpensive, Fleury advocates putting as much data as possible in memory to avoid remote procedure calls.

'The question is 'Do you have to go to another machine to get that data, or is that data available in memory?' If it's in memory, then it's blazingly fast. You're never writing anything, you're just reading directly from memory,' he explains. 'That gives you a speed improvement.'

He argues that having data locally available in each server's memory is 'the biggest thing you can do to speed up applications.'

Carl Olofson, IDC program director for information management and data integration research, agrees performance possibilities should attract Java coders. 'The combination of JBossCache and Berkeley DB Java Edition should appeal to developers looking for high-performance data access using an open-source Java-based approach,' he writes.

Under the technology partnership announced this past week by the two open-source vendors, JBossCache will ship with the Berkeley DB Java Edition as the default persistence option. Key features of the integrated product, according to Fleury, are 'in-memory replication' of data in each server's RAM and the persistence of data as provided through Berkeley.

JBossCache 1.1 with Berkeley DB Java Edition bundled with it is available for free download. More information is available at http://www.jboss.com/products/jbosscache  .

More information on Sleepycat's Berkeley database is available at http://www.sleepycat.com/jeforjbosscache .