Enterprise JavaBeans caching in clustered environments

We present the design of an Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) caching architecture, and show that EJB caching can greatly improve application throughput in clustered environments. Throughput is improved because data serving is offloaded from the database server to the cache-enabled application server. EJB caching is successful because it exploits the low-latency connections between the database server and application servers that exist in a clustered environment. An important feature of our architecture is that the caching function is transparent to applications that use it. The cache-enabled application server uses the same (EJB) programming model, and the same transactional semantics, as provided by non-caching architectures. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.