Pretty big news in the Java world today.
Open-source with a business model company, Terracotta, acquired Ehcache, the very popular caching library.
The creator and maintainer of Ehcache, Greg Luck, had these things to say about the acquisition:
What this means for Ehcache Users
- Ehcache remains under the Apache 2 license
- New feature development is accelerated with the addition of a team of engineers working full-time on Ehcache
- I am full-time on Ehcache. I have not had the time I would have liked to devote to Ehcache (I have been doing a miserly 10-15 hours per week for the past 6 years) but now I do. Look out!
- Ehcache extends its standards support. There are multiple emerging standards in this area and I plan to work with the community to lead further standardisation efforts. A lack of time has been my biggest obstacle in doing more on this to date.
- Ehcache gets new hosting at ehcache.org with state-of-the-art forums, source control and bug reporting. The changes will happen slowly and carefully.
- File release at sourceforge.net is retained
- Maven deployment to oss.sonatype.org and Maven Central is retained.
- Distributed caching via Terracotta is seamless. Ehcache users can have full confidence that they can start single node and scale as high as they need to with Enterprise features.
- Enterprise support, training and professional services for Ehcache. I have provided these for a few years now, but now we will have the full Terracotta organisation behind them with the usual SLAs.
What this means for Terracotta Users
- Ehcache APIs will replace Terracotta distributed cache APIs as a single caching interface / standard for Terracotta distributed caching
- a single-node version of Terracotta ala Ehcache will be available for the first time
- Full freedom to run on the latest version of Ehcache at all times, knowing it will work with Terracotta
- Single vendor support structure for caching interfaces / libraries as well as their scalability / reliability runtime.
- the investment protection of standards
It’s pretty cool to see open source companies like SpringSource (recently acquired by VMWare) and Terracotta making big moves. I look forward to seeing what’s next for these guys.