This week's webinar is on Ehcache, the popular java-based cache - #1 among GlassFish users, according to a recent informal survey. This presentation, by Greg Luck, its lead maintainer and the Chief Architect of Wotif.com, covers the theory of caching, the architecture of Ehcache, Features of the product, Usage Patterns and includes some code samples. The presentation on Thursday, May 7th, 11am US Pacific, at TheAquarium Channel. Full details (and recordings) at the Show Page.

Memcached is a distributed, in-memory, cache that was popularized by LiveJournal. Memcached has good performance but it runs as a deamon (diagram) and an interesting question is whether local, cooperating, in-memory caches might do better. Greg implemented this approach in ehCache (diagram, Wotif.COM) and recently ran some comparisons that suggest ehCache is much faster.

Greg gave a full report on this topic in TS-6039 at JavaOne but the slides are not yet online. Fortunately he just published a short summary in his blog site (see comparison graph). There was also a micro-session at CommunityDay and I'll let you know when we push the slides to the Virtual GlassFish Day page.