Christoph Engelbert is Manager of Developer Relations at Hazelcast. He is a passionated Java developer with a deep commitment for Open Source software. He mostly is interested in Performance Optimizations and understanding the internals of the JVM and the Garbage Collector. He loves to bring software to it’s limits by looking into profilers and finding problems inside of the codebase.
Hey lads, lemme tell ya a story.
Once upon a time, we’re talking about the year 2001, a few people had an amazing idea. They were thinking about something that would change the world. It would make the world easy and give programmers almost unlimited power! It was simply referred to as JSR 107, one of the least things to change in the upcoming future. But those pals were way ahead of their time and nothing really happend. So time passed by and by and by and over the years it was buried in the deep catacombs of the JCP. Eventually, in 2011, two brave knights took on the fight and worked themselves through all the pathlessness, to finalize it in 2014. Lads you know what I’m talking about, they called it the “Java Caching API” or in short “JCache”. Yes you heard me, a Java standard for Caching!
A software system cannot possibly imagined without Caching today and it was time for a standard. No matter if you want to cache database queries, generated HTML or results of long running calculations, new systems have to reach a critical mass to be successful. Therefore caching becomes a First-Class-Citizen of application landscape, the principle of Caching First. JCache has grown for 13 years to it’s final success and had an amazing Co-Spec-Lead, Greg Luck - the inventor of EHcache.
