What can Terracotta do for you in 2010.

2009 was a great year for Terracotta in many ways. In terms of product releases, each release was packed with features that raised the bar in terms of value and simplicity, at least an order of magnitude. Here's a brief list:

• Release of the Terracotta Server Array - i.e multiple active Terracotta Servers with the Terracotta Platform 3.0 release, to afford virtually unlimited scale-out characteristics.

• Amazingly simple yet powerful, Hibernate 2nd Level Cache Product released with Terracotta Platform 3.1, offers immediate database offload for Applications that ORM (Hibernate) to the Database.
  

• Acquisition of Ehcache and the tighter integration between this ubiquitous caching framework and the underlying Terracotta smart replication technology with 3.1.1 - in the form of Terracotta Ehcache Product Line.

• Acquisition of Quartz and the tighter integration between this ubiquitous job-scheduling framework and the underlying Terracotta smart replication technology with 3.2 - in the form of the Terracotta Quartz Product Line.

• And with each release, the Terracotta Platform and its smart replication technology (DSO) was solidified and improved upon in terms of Lock Management, Fault Path Optimization, Heart Beating features and Disk I/O on the Terracotta Server.
  

• Several Visualization tools were added to the Platform and Products, mentioned above (Ehcache Panel, Hibernate Cache Region Panel, Improvements to the Terracotta Developer Console and Terracotta Operations Console).

A picture is worth a thousand words - so look at the attached animated GIF which delineates the entire suite of Terracotta Products available and where they apply within the stack.


(Seems like you need to click on the Animated image to get the animation going).

So use a specific product to solve a point problem or with the Enterprise Suite, ensure that each element within the stack benefits from simpler code-base, lesser RDBMS dependency and lower operating costs. The DX, EX, FX are basically versions along a scale continuum - so for standalone, non-distributed versions use DX, for medium scale use EX, for high-end scale use FX (since that allows for an unlimited number of active Terracotta Servers).

The power that is depicted in the animated graphic is real:

• For Terracotta Ehcache look at - http://www.terracotta.org/ehcache/ and http://www.terracotta.org/ehcache/distributed-cache/ehcache-ex-hibernate.
  
• For Terracotta Quartz look at - http://dsoguy.blogspot.com/2009/12/clustered-quartz-scheduler-in-5-minutes.html and http://www.terracotta.org/quartz/
  
• For Terracotta Sessions look at - http://www.terracotta.org/web-sessions/
  
• For Terracotta Platform, look at - http://www.terracotta.org/platform/
  

2010 Roadmap is packed with features as well, which should further simplify your consumption of Terracotta even further, with further improvements in Scaling and Latency. Enjoy....