Hazelcast IMDG First Caching Provider to Integrate with Open Liberty

Palo Alto, Calif., May 10, 2018Hazelcast®, the leading open source in-memory data management company with tens of thousands of installed clusters and over 55 million server starts per month, today announced that Open Liberty will be using Hazelcast IMDG® as its preferred caching provider for a session replication module it has developed based on JCache. JCache is a Java Specification Request (JSR) which specifies API and semantics for temporary, in-memory caching of Java objects, including object creation, shared access, spooling, invalidation, and consistency across JVM’s. Hazelcast is one of the industry’s first JCache providers and its CEO/CTO, Greg Luck, has been the co-specification lead on JSR 107 since 2007.

Open Liberty, an open source project launched by IBM, is an open source version of the IBM WebSphere Liberty application server. It is focused on creating a runtime to support Java microservices and cloud-native apps that can be frequently updated and easily moved between different cloud environments. It is part of a broader and long-standing commitment from IBM to open source. As well as creating Open Liberty, IBM has also contributed the IBM J9 VM to Eclipse as Eclipse OpenJ9. The combination of OpenJ9 and Open Liberty provides the full Java stack from IBM with a fully open licensing model.

Alongside IBM, Hazelcast is a member of the Eclipse Foundation, where it brings extensive Java-driven community experience to a host of open source projects. Both companies work on the Eclipse MicroProfile project, which is defining common API’s and infrastructure to make it easy to create microservices applications without vendor lock in. Community members innovate independently, but the MicroProfile project allows collaboration where there is a commonality, in this case session replication based on JCache.

JCache accelerates mainstream adoption of in-memory computing by giving all Java developers an easy-to-use and standard way to access memory from within Java. By using Hazelcast IMDG, enterprises can scale out applications and manage their high-speed access to frequently used data and change providers without having to rewrite their applications or maintain a proprietary bespoke cache abstraction layer. Hazelcast IMDG seamlessly integrates with JCache – achieving its caching potential with a 100% compliant implementation that transparently registers with the JCache subsystem.

“The creation of Open Liberty is part of a broader strategy and long-standing commitment from IBM to open source. 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,” commented Walt Noffsinger, Director of IBM Application Platform and Runtimes.

Greg Luck, CEO of Hazelcast, said: “Hazelcast is pleased to see Open Liberty adopt the JCache standard and also that Open Liberty will be using Hazelcast IMDG as its caching provider. 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.”