Grails, Hazelcast, Hibernate and 2nd level cache

If you'd like to use Grails with Hazelcast caching solution you need to be aware that there is an issue with Hazelcast compatibility with the version of Hibernate used by Grails (3.6.10.Final).

Reading on the Hazelcast Wiki you'll be tempted to use the "new" ways and specify hibernate.cache.region.factory_class. Unfortunately that doesn't work. See this bug report for more information.

But there is hope! Instead you can specify hibernate.cache.provider_class and everything should work as expected. Hibernate does all the adapter heavy lifting and life is good again :)

Anyways, Hazelcast is plain ecstatic - you should really give it a try and get a feel of what a good library feels like when you use it. It's awesome!!!

Hazelcast and Grails

If you'll ever find yourself in need to partition your Grails application in order to provide high or availability or if you're lucky enough in order to increase processing power because your database is already not the bottleneck (which it will be for a long long time) then you should definitely check out Hazelcast and its Hazelcast WM module. Configuration is dead simple (a few lines in web.xml) and the thing is capable of auto discovery using multicast so you just add instances of both the Hazelcast distributed cache as well as instances of your application and everything just works.

Man, it's been a while since I found a tool that just does the job no questions asked and Hazelcast definitely is one of them!

And live is good again :)