I’ve started exploring some of the available cache software out there, and kicked things off with ehcache. I’ve gotta say that first experiences have been excellent!
It’s been very easy to learn, (create a CacheManager, create a Cache, add the Cache to the CacheManager, presto!), and it’s a very tight implementations (50Kb). Persists itself to disk. Handles expiry of elements from the Cache. It’s battle tested (looks like the guys from Wotif.com have opened it to the world), and very accessible. Hey, it’s even used in Hibernate and Gavin is a committer!
It’s not JSR 107 compliant, and it doesn’t support distributed cache work out of the box. But it’s fast, it works, it’s small, and I was productive in 10 minutes. The doco is good, and the API has had no surprises so far. An all-round excellent piece of work. Kudos to the lads at Wotif!