Probably the most promising technology I’ve seen on this year’s DevOxx is Infinispan, a highly scalable data grid platform from JBoss.

It’s essentially the next major release of JBoss Cache, but it has a seriously expanded potential, especially if you combine it with the emerging availability of cloud computing.

A possible application will be a distributed data store on massive amount of nodes in a cloud environment.  Through the massive distribution of the data in the data grid, you have continuus availability, very high redundancy and endless scalability + a relatively easy management (some positive evolution of the current cloud possibilities taken into account)

When JBoss will be able to realize their vision, technology like Infinispan will be able to replace traditional RDBMS engines “in the cloud”.

We’re not there yet, because the JPA-Like interface they envision will be not yet available in the upcoming 4.0 release, but is part of the roadmap for v5.0.  It will take at least another year before that’s available.
Also, the term “JPA-like” is worth mentioning: e.g. Joins will never be supported in their QL dialect. 

The roadmap also foresees a language independent module to support other languages than Java.

It is very much worthwhile following what these guys are up to.

You can read more at http://www.jboss.org/infinispan

Oh yes, did I already say it’s 100% open source?