We just had to take advantage of this... so we are running a special mid-cycle event, a week before our regular March 9th meetup.

So, Greg Luck, the founder or Ehcache, happens to be in town on March 2nd, and he generously offered to share his wisdom on implementing effective Java-app caching strategies in general, and in Hibernate apps in particular!

For those that don't know, Ehcache is an open source, standards-based cache used in a wide array of applications to boost performance, offload the database and simplify scalability. Ehcache is robust, proven and full-features and this has made it the most widely used Java-based cache. Also, Greg lives in Australia, so we are lucky to have him present at our group!

So, Greg will walk through the Spring Pet Clinic as an application example and show us how to tune it for maximum performance, both when using Hibernate and when caching result sets directly.

He will show us from his own benchmarking tests the comparative application performance of Ehcache EX 1.8 versus MySQL, Memcached and a leading In-Memory Data Grid, including the impressive performance increases from the latest Terracotta 3.2 Server Array.

Finally, Greg will also discuss some upcoming features in Ehcache 2.0 such as JTA, bulk loading, the new Hibernate 3.3 provider and write-behind.

Ari Zilka, the CTO at Terracotta, generously offered to assist Greg in his presentation and demos, so we are really going to learn from the pros!

This event will take place at Terracotta's office at 650 Townsend (between 7th and 8th), Suite 325. Terracotta also kindly offered to provide pizzas and refreshments for this event!

Be sure to stick around until the end to get a shot at winning books and other interesting goodies from Sun, O'Reilly, Packt Pub, as well as a copy of IntelliJ IDEA from JetBrains.

Update: Terracotta will also give away a $300 netbook to a lucky winner!

About Greg Luck
Greg founded Ehcache in 2003. He regularly speaks at conferences, writes and codes. He has also founded and maintains the JPam and Spnego open source projects, which are security focused. Prior to joining Terracotta in 2009, Greg was Chief Architect at Wotif.com where he provided technical leadership as the company went from a single product startup to a billion dollar public company with multiple product lines. Before that Greg was a consultant for ThoughtWorks with engagements in the US and Australia in the travel, health care, geospatial, banking and insurance industries. Before doing programming, Greg managed IT. He was CIO at Virgin Blue, Tempo Services, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Australian Resorts. He is a Chartered Accountant, and spent 7 years with KPMG in small business and insolvency. Greg holds a Bachelor of Commerce and a Masters in Information Technology.

About Ari Zilka
Ari is a frequent speaker at technical conferences, such as SpringOne, QCon, Devoxx, and JavaOne, where this year he accepted the 2009 Java Everywhere Duke's Choice Award for Terracotta.

Before founding Terracotta in 2003, Ari was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Accel Partners. Before joining Accel, Ari was the Chief Architect at Walmart.com, where he led the innovation and development of the company's new engineering initiatives. At Walmart.com, he built and led a team of core engineers focused on performance management, and operations cost-saving measures.

Prior to Walmart.com, Ari worked as a consultant at Sapient and before that at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. During these years, he managed development and advised businesses on high technology strategy and deployment. His accomplishments at Sapient include the successful launch of Walmart.com, as well as successful engagements with Gap.com and Nike.com. At PriceWaterhouseCoopers, he worked with Harrod's of London, Siemens, Intel, Compaq, Barnes & Noble, and others.

Ari's career started as a software engineer for a subsidiary of Motorola, where he wrote groundbreaking wireless paging software. Since then, his software development accomplishments also include projects revolving around statistical analysis and data warehousing. In the mid 1990's, Ari invented a new object relational database that still exceeds the capabilities and performance of database technology today.

Ari holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Computer Science as well as in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley.