Clustering OSCache
For the past few days, I've been tuning and configuring OSCache in a clustered (WebLogic) environment. While setting it up was fairly easy, there was some fundamental concepts that took me a bit to figure out.
First of all, I chose to use JavaGroups instead of JMS. The primary reason behind this was it was easier to configure, but I also discovered that if you use JMS - you have to have a unique "cache.cluster.jms.node.name" property in your oscache.properties file on each server. This means to use OSCache with JMS, you have to build two different EARs. At least that's my impression. If you've figured out a better way to do this, please let me know.
In the application I'm working on, there are 4 different caches: one for Hibernate, and several other ones we've created with OSCache and Spring. For the past week, I developed a feature where we cache a user's account information across the cluster. The feature is more like an HttpSession than a cache b/c it's designed to replicate an authentication token (similar to a session id) across all the master servers.
After much head pounding, I discovered that OSCache doesn't update other nodes in a cluster for inserts and updates. It only broadcasts flushes. After understanding how OSCache works, it was much easier for me to code the solution (sans OSCache). If you'd like to see OSCache support replicating a cache across a cluster, vote for CACHE-96.