I will be joining Hazelcast as CTO

I am very excited to announce that I will be joining the world-class team at Hazelcast as CTO.

Hazelcast (www.hazelcast.com) develops, distributes and supports the leading open source in-memory data grid. The product, also called Hazelcast, is a free open source download under the Apache license that any developer can include in minutes to enable them to build elegantly simple mission-critical, transactional, and terascale in-memory applications. The company provides commercially licensed Enterprise extensions, Hazelcast Management Console and professional open source training, development support and deployment support. The company is privately held and headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

What this means for Hazelcast Users

I will join my efforts to those of Hazelcast CEO Talip Ozturk and the team and bring my deep knowledge of caching to Hazelcast to complement that of the team. I will be out and about at conferences and visiting customers.

With the team we will be figuring out what great features to add to Hazelcast and how to improve the leading open source In-Memory Data Grid.

We will also be bring to market Enterprise Extensions which add high value features based around the Hazelcast core.

Hazelcast has made an announcement that puts this move into their own words.

What this means for Terracotta BigMemory Users

We will develop a comparative caching/operational store project and product based on Hazelcast core.   This will then be an alternative for BigMemory users.

What this means for Ehcache Users

The ownership of Ehcache was transferred to Terracotta 4 and a half years ago when I joined them who then took over maintenance of it.

While Ehcache remains widely used today, the open source version is only suitable for single node caching. This is not that useful for most production contexts so it is not directly competitive with Hazelcast or for that matter In-Memory Data Grids, which deal with clusters of computers.

I expect Ehcache will implement JCache and that in the future those ISVs and open source frameworks which currently define Ehcache as their caching layer will instead define it using JCache, of which Ehcache will be one provider.

Hazelcast is already developing their JCache implementation, which is already up on GitHub.

What this means for JCache

JCache is the new standard for caches and IMDGs. It includes a key-value API suitable for caches and operational stores. Importantly it was designed primarily for IMDGs. Listeners, loaders, writers and other user-defined classes are expected to be executed somewhere in the cluster, not in process.  And the spec defines and single and batch EntryProcessors, the defining feature of IMDG, which enables in-situ computation.

I will continue to act as spec lead on new maintenance releases of JCache. And I will also work with the Java EE 8 expert group who are including JCache in Java EE8. And I will be working with open source frameworks and ISVs as they move to add a JCache layer to their architectures.

Hazelcast will be one of the first to market with an implementation of JCache which should be available in a production-ready implementation in February.

As it is Apache 2 open source, I encourage open source frameworks and ISVs to include Hazelcast in their distributions as they add JCache. That way they can ship with an out of the box IMDG built in without locking themselves or their users/customers into a single vendor.