Terracotta simplifies Object Partners capabilities to deliver fast, reliable, and scalable Java applications.

February 2nd, 2010, Minneapolis, MN. Object Partners, Inc. (OPI), an IT consulting firm that specializes in building and deploying large-scale applications, is using Terracotta to build scalable applications faster. Terracotta allows OPI developers to easily share state across clustered applications, and provides excellent support for managing concurrency throughout the cluster.

“One of the greatest benefits of using Terracotta is achieving high availability (HA),” says John Holland, Sr. Consultant for Object Partners. “By having a farm of servers that all share common data using Terracotta, no single one becomes a point of failure. This allows a user to access any server for any request at any point during their session and not know the difference. Terracotta itself can be scaled up for increased performance as needed and configured for fault tolerance.”

Terracotta is entirely written in Java code, and that simplifies scalability for Java applications by synchronizing user defined subsets of Java heap across multiple Virtual Machines for the Java platform (Java Virtual Machine or JVM) on different physical machines. This enables threads on machines across a cluster to communicate with each other as though they were all in the same local machine, making it easier to cluster and scale a wide variety of Java applications with little or no code changes, and with significant performance benefits in most cases.

“Performance increases can be gained by reducing an application’s dependence on the database,” says Holland. “This is done by caching commonly used objects and allowing coarser grained transactions. For example, in a typical application there may be a wizard that gathers data screen by screen, to prevent user data loss the partial information is persisted to the database. By using Terracotta, the application can avoid all of those intermediate database transactions and persist only the final product.”

About Terracotta

Terracotta is a software company and eponymous open source development project that delivers enterprise Java application scalability and availability. Terracotta also provides database scalability with Hibernate and high-performance distributed caching. This enables our customers to reduce their development efforts and ongoing operating costs.

Our community is home to some of the world’s experts in building infrastructure that simplifies development of highly reliable, highly scalable, high performance Java applications. Core development is sponsored by Terracotta, Inc., a private company with its headquarters in San Francisco, California.

The Terracotta open source project has support from many open source companies including Spring, Tomcat and Geronimo and many thousands of community members.

To encourage employees to live greener, healthier lives Object Partners Inc. has extended new benefits to those who pedal to work.  When the $700 Billion dollar bailout bill passed last fall, The Bicycle Commuter Act quietly passed making available the ability for companies to offer reimbursement for bicyclists as well as those who bus or require parking.  Employees who ride their bicycles to work can now be reimbursed for a portion of the cost of cycling – tune ups, tires, bike locker rental, etc..

The offering helps people choose a healthier, more eco-friendly way to get to and from work.  Of course the residual benefits come in reducing congestion, pollution, and demand for fossil fuels.  Forward thinking companies incentifying employees to make the right choices is a great first step in changing domestic corporate culture for everyones benefit.  It is really wonderful to see companies like Object Partners jump in and get behind greening up IT.

OPI announces the addition of Jason Umerski to their business operations staff. Jason’s main responsibility will be to grow OPI’s consulting footprint within the twin cities metro by leveraging OPI’s expertise and exceptional reputation of delivering large, complex, mission critical applications. Jason comes to OPI with 6 years of IT sales and services experience with some of the top regional and national companies in the business. Prior to his sales career, he was also technical consultant for 10 years at various fortune 500 companies in the twin cities metro. His addition solidifies OPI’s strategy towards gaining marketshare within the local IT/software community.