News

Open Liberty Using Hazelcast IMDG based on JCache

• By John K. Waters
• May 16, 2018

Open Liberty, the open-source implementation of Eclipse MicroProfile and Java EE from IBM, and the foundation of the WebSphere Liberty app server, is adopting Hazelcast’s in-memory data grid (IMDG) as its preferred caching provider, the two companies announced. The IMDG will be used for a session replication module based on JCache.

Session replication is a high-availability feature that allows another application server to continue the user’s browser session without interruption.

The Open Liberty Project was created about five years ago when IBM released its Liberty development assets to open source under the Eclipse Public License v1. The project’s goal is to make it possible for Java microservices to be frequently updated and easily moved among different cloud environments.

"The creation of Open Liberty is part of a broader strategy and long-standing commitment from IBM to open source," said Walt Noffsinger, Director of IBM’s Application Platform and Runtimes group, in a statement. "With the integration of Open Liberty and Hazelcast IMDG, more developers will be able to turn their ideas and innovations into full-fledged, enterprise ready cloud apps and benefit the broader Java community."

JCache was developed in the Java Community Process (JCP) to define an API and semantics for temporary, in-memory caching of Java objects, including object creation, shared access, spooling, invalidation, and consistency across JVMs. It’s designed to accelerate mainstream adoption of in-memory computing by giving Java developers an easy-to-use and standard way to access memory from within Java. JCache provides what Hazelcast CTO Greg Luck has described as "a well thought out, standardized API and programming contract for Java caching." Luck co-authored the JCache spec.

"Our partnership with Open Liberty serves the interests of the wider Java development community and is in line with our wider cloud strategy of enabling developers to more easily drop Hazelcast IMDG into applications on their cloud of choice," Luck said in a statement.

Palo Alto, CA-based Hazelcast has roots planted deeply in the Java language and platform (its IMDG is written in Java), but the company has spread its support over the years, thanks in part to the efforts of its open source community, to include several clients and programming languages.

The Hazelcast IMDG is an open-source product distributed under an Apache 2 license that allows developers to include the grid in their applications. Hazelcast Enterprise is the commercially supported version.