Tangosol Inc. this week announced a new version of its Coherence data management solution for enterprise Java applications that includes support for IBM Corp.'s WebSphere application server, among other new features.

Coherence 2.4 delivers clustered session management for WebSphere and features a new "write-mostly" caching model, said Cameron Purdy, chief executive of Somerville, Mass.-based Tangosol. The company focuses on delivering in-memory caching and data management for clustered J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) applications.

Purdy said the product's "write-mostly" caching supports caching of large amounts of "automatically expiring data, using potentially high-latency storage mechanisms" such as disk files. This delivers support for larger data sets than can typically be managed in memory, he said.

In addition, Purdy said the caching "is particularly appropriate for applications with many large objects, XML documents, or content that will rarely be accessed, or whose accesses will tolerate a higher latency if the cached data has been paged to disk."

Coherence 2.4 adds WebSphere to the platforms Tangosol supports, which include BEA Systems Inc.'s WebLogic, and the open-source Tomcat, Jetty and Resin platforms.

Jeff Kischuk, general manager of Idimax.com, the Internet messaging service arm of Toronto-based Dimax Controls Inc., said: "Their technology helped us in a few significant ways. As a startup, we were charged with taking an idea, and a piece of pilot technology that was running for one user on a single machine, and developing a commercially viable solution to support thousands of concurrent users without a performance risk or degradation. This was a daunting task due to the nature of our application, which is based around remote data access, monitoring, and reporting—all very data intense—with the potential of a [database] server choking under high data loads. The team had determined that a Java caching solution of some kind would be ideal. The ability to cache Java objects and data across multiple servers, and completing these jobs and processes outside of the database meant that we could do more with less, and still maintain quick response times and notifications to events."

Dealer.com Inc., of Burlington, Vt., is another user of Tangosol's Coherence, which has helped the automotive Web solutions provider support more than 2,500 car dealers.

Purdy said Dealer.com faced scalability problems as new servers were added. But Tangosol came in and provided Coherence, with features such as XML Bean support, a distributed query facility and "write-behind" database updates. He said Dealer.com uses the Coherence Distributed Query Facility in its QuoteFactory application, which enables buyers to make complex queries to find the cars they seek.

In addition to other features in the new version, Purdy said Tangosol added a document management feature, which helps customers such as those in the financial services industry, who have large data feeds.

Tangosol was founded in 2000 by a team of developers who had been working as enterprise Java consultants. Purdy said they "liked the Java enterprise space and … wanted to productize solutions for high-end Java enterprise applications."

As consultants, Purdy and his colleagues did performance monitoring and acted as their clients' "Java services arm."

He said that "the J2EE tier was going up very nicely but was bottlenecking on the database. But companies said if they could keep the data on the J2EE tier and keep it in synch, they wouldn't have to go back to the data store."

Tangosol and Coherence is a response to those concerns. "Coherence sits in the J2EE tier and provides access to large amounts of data very, very quickly."

Coherence supports replicated, cluster-partitioned and near-data caching, Purdy said.

This article was first published on eweek.com.