News

JvCache: Native Java Implementation of NCache Goes Live

• By John K. Waters
• August 6, 2013

Alachisoft recently released a native Java implementation of its in-memory .NET distributed cache, NCache. The new JvCache is a 100 percent Java version of the company's flagship .NET cache, and the company is billing it as a fast and scalable version of that technology aimed at mission critical Java apps that have real-time data access requirements.

JvCache was developed from the source code of NCache, said Josh Hamid, Alachisoft's director of marketing. The .NET cache was developed with C#, so it's native .NET tech that can be used to provide a distributed cache from any .NET app, including ASP.NET, WCF, and .NET web services. That technology has been around for about eight years, which gives the new Java implementation "the maturity and stability of NCache," Hamid said.

Because it was "developed end-to-end with Java," the company says, JvCache is fits into any Java application environment. It can be used as a distributed cache for JSP servlets, Web services, grid computing applications and any server-type apps with high transactions. "So, whether you're making client-side API calls to JvCache as your Java distributed cache or developing server-side code for Read-thru/Write-thru, rest assured that you will always be in native Java environment," the company says.

The new Java-based cache comes with a set of GUI-based administration and monitoring tools, and a built-in performance monitoring tool. It's an elastic cache with self-healing dynamic cache cluster, and its caching topologies includes Mirrored, Replicated, Partitioned, and Client Cache. Other features include cache synchronization with relational databases, data relationship management through Cache Dependency, and read-through and write-through, Object Query Language (OQL) based searching. And it supports such Java SE and Java EE environments as Oracle's WebLogic, IBM's WebSphere, JBoss, and Apache Tomcat.

Headquartered in San Ramon, Calif., Alachisoft is best-known as a provider of .NET solutions for developers. The company has been around in its current form since 2003, and its product portfolio includes TierDeveloper, a free object-to-relational mapping code generator, and StorageEdge, which allows users to offload SharePoint BLOBs to outside storage.

Companies like Alachisoft are a capability gap in Java EE 7, which has long been criticized for its lack of caching capability. The Java community's efforts to create its own caching capability was delayed this year when the Java Temporary Caching API (JCache) was not included in the release of Java EE 7. Developers of the long-awaited specs for the standardization of temporary, in-memory caching of Java objects missed a few critical deadlines. JCache is being developed by the Java Community Process (JCP) as Java Specification Request (JSR) 107. The project summary explains that the spec standardizes in-process caching of Java objects "in a way that allows an efficient implementation, and removes from the programmer the burden of implementing cache expiration, mutual exclusion, spooling, and cache consistency." The JCP has scheduled the public review ballot on JCache to run from August 20 through September 2.

Meanwhile, a 60-day, fully working trial of JvCache is available here.