JBoss Cache is a tree-structured, clustered, transactional cache. It is the backbone for many fundamental JBoss Application Server clustering services, including - in certain versions - clustering JNDI, HTTP and EJB sessions.

JBoss Cache can also be used as a standalone transactional and clustered caching library or even an object oriented data store. It can even be embedded in other enterprise Java frameworks and application servers such as BEA WebLogic or IBM WebSphere, Tomcat, Spring, Hibernate, and many others. It is also very commonly used directly by standalone Java applications that do not run from within an application server, to maintain clustered state.

JBoss Cache offers a simple and straightforward API, where data (simple Java objects) can be placed in the cache and, based on configuration options selected, this data may be one or all of:

In addition, JBoss Cache offers a rich set of enterprise-class features:

A cache is organised as a tree, with a single root. Each node in the tree essentially contains a Map, which acts as a store for key/value pairs. The only requirement placed on objects that are cached is that they implement java.io.Serializable . Note that this requirement does not exist for Pojo Cache.

JBoss Cache can be either local or replicated. Local trees exist only inside the JVM in which they are created, whereas replicated trees propagate any changes to some or all other trees in the same cluster. A cluster may span different hosts on a network or just different JVMs on a single host.

When a change is made to an object in the cache and that change is done in the context of a transaction, the replication of changes is deferred until the transaction commits successfully. All modifications are kept in a list associated with the transaction for the caller. When the transaction commits, we replicate the changes. Otherwise, (on a rollback) we simply undo the changes locally resulting in zero network traffic and overhead. For example, if a caller makes 100 modifications and then rolls back the transaction, we will not replicate anything, resulting in no network traffic.

If a caller has no transaction associated with it (and isolation level is not NONE - more about this later), we will replicate right after each modification, e.g. in the above case we would send 100 messages, plus an additional message for the rollback. In this sense, running without a transaction can be thought of as analogous as running with auto-commit switched on in JDBC terminology, where each operation is committed automatically.

JBoss Cache works out of the box with most popular transaction managers, and even provides an API where custom transaction manager lookups can be written.

The cache is also completely thread-safe. It uses a pessimistic locking scheme for nodes in the tree by default, with an optimistic locking scheme as a configurable option. With pessimistic locking, the degree of concurrency can be tuned using a number of isolation levels, corresponding to database-style transaction isolation levels, i.e., SERIALIZABLE, REPEATABLE_READ, READ_COMMITTED, READ_UNCOMMITTED and NONE. Concurrency, locking and isolation levels will be discussed later.

JBoss Cache requires Java 5.0 (or newer).

However, there is a way to build JBoss Cache as a Java 1.4.x compatible binary using JBossRetro to retroweave the Java 5.0 binaries. However, Red Hat Inc. does not offer professional support around the retroweaved binary at this time and the Java 1.4.x compatible binary is not in the binary distribution. See this wiki page for details on building the retroweaved binary for yourself.

In addition to Java 5.0, at a minimum, JBoss Cache has dependencies on JGroups , and Apache's commons-logging . JBoss Cache ships with all dependent libraries necessary to run out of the box.

JBoss Cache is an open source product, using the business and OEM-friendly OSI-approved LGPL license. Commercial development support, production support and training for JBoss Cache is available through JBoss, a division of Red Hat Inc. JBoss Cache is a part of JBoss Professional Open Source JEMS (JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite).