ReadWriteEnterprise

Today Software AG announced its acquisition of Terracotta, the sponsor of the open source distributed data cache for Java applications called Ehcache. Terracotta claims that Ehcache is the most widely used Java cache. The company sells enterprise support for Ehcache, as well as an Ehcache-based solution called BigMemory.

Software AG is the fourth largest company in Europe and is best known for as a business process management (BPM) software vendor. According to the company's announcement: "This acquisition will allow Software AG to provide innovative cloud solutions and dramatically increase the performance and scalability of its Business Process Excellence platform."

Terracotta is trying to solve one of the biggest issues for Java developers. It's called garbage collection. And it wastes time. It can makes a mess of big data, causing all kinds of latency issues.

Terracotta says they solved the issue by creating their own memory manager. The product, called BigMemory, manages the memory for cached data outside of the standard Java heap. Normally Java stores its data as a graph of objects on the heap. The garbage collector is responsible for figuring out what objects are trash. Terracotta uses the knowledge of the cache to avoid the complexities of determining what objects are trash.