Caching has been an essential strategy for greater performance in computing since the beginning of the field. Nearly all applications have data access patterns that make caching an attractive technique, but caching also has hidden trade-offs related to concurrency, memory usage, and latency.

Ehcache and Terracotta provide a unique way to start with simple caching for a small system and grow that system over time with a consistent API while maintaining low-latency, high-throughput caching.

There will be "a bunch of Terracotta swag to give away"!

Alex Miller is a Senior Engineer with Revelytix, building federated semantic web query technology. Prior to Revelytix, Alex was technical lead at Terracotta, an engineer at BEA Systems, and Chief Architect at MetaMatrix. His interests include Java, concurrency, distributed systems, languages, and software design. Alex enjoys tweeting as @puredanger and blogging at http://tech.puredanger.com. In St. Louis, Alex is the founder of the Lambda Lounge group for the study of functional and dynamic languages and the Strange Loop developer conference.