Recently I attended a lecture presented by Manik Surtani , JBoss Cache & Infinispan project lead. The goal of the talk was to provide a technical overview of both products and outline Infinispan's road-map. Infinispan is the successor to the open-source JBoss Cache. JBoss Cache was originally targeted at simple web page caching and Infinispan builds on this to take it into the Cloud paradigm.

Why did I attend? Well, over the past few years I have worked on projects that have used commercial distributed caching (aka data grid) technologies such as GemFire, GigaSpaces XAP or Oracle Coherence . These projects required more functionality than is currently provided by open-source solutions such as memcached or EHCache. Looking at the road-map for Infinispan, I was struck by its ambition – will it provide the functionality that I need?

Read more at: http://bigdatamatters.com/bigdatamatters/2009/09/infinispan-vs-gigaspaces.html