Last Updated on April 16, 2022
Oracle is a computer technology corporation best known for its software products and services like Java.
In 2020, Oracle was the second-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. They employ over 130,000 people, and sell cloud-engineering services and systems and database management systems.
Oracle has a fairly prominent position with open source. They are a supporting member of the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and the Java Community Process.
Through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle also became the steward of many other important and long-running open source projects such as the Java programming language and the MySQL relational database, introduced in 1995. The acquisition of Sleepycat Software, brought the open source Berkeley DB key/value store.
The company co-develops the OpenJDK, an open source implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition, and Btrfs, a B-tree file system. They also open source the Oracle Coherence Community Edition, NetBeans, and produce Oracle Linux which is a Linux distro compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code.
While Oracle develops and distributes open source software, they have many different business models. The majority of their products are published under a proprietary license. This series looks at free and open source alternatives to Oracle’s products.
Oracle Web Cache is a secure reverse proxy cache and a compression engine deployed between a browser and HTTP server as well as between a browser and content management server.
Web Cache is proprietary software. What are the best free and open source alternatives?
1. Varnish Cache
Varnish Cache is a web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind. Its modern architecture gives it a significantly better performance. Varnish stores web pages in memory so the web servers do not have to create the same web page repeatedly. The web server only recreates a page when it is changed. When content is served from memory this happens a lot faster then anything.
2. nginx
nginx is a very powerful and efficient web server and reverse proxy. It uses a scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture in contrast to a threaded or process-oriented approach to handling requests. This architecture uses small, but more importantly, predictable amounts of memory under load.
This server can be used as standalone HTTP server and as a reverse proxy server before some Apache or another big server to reduce load to backend servers by many concurrent HTTP-sessions.
3. Traffic Server
Traffic Server is a fast, modular, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1 compliant caching proxy server. It speeds internet access, enhances the performance of a website, as well as delivering web hosting capabilities.
This software is a high-performance building block for cloud services. It is more than just a caching proxy server, as it also has support for plugins to build large scale web applications.
4. Squid
Squid is also a high-performance proxy caching server and web cache daemon. It supports FTP, gopher and HTTP data objects.
Squid has a wide variety of uses, from speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests, caching web, DNS and other computer network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources; to aiding security by filtering traffic.
All articles in this series:
| Alternatives to Oracle's Products | |
|---|---|
 | Business Intelligence is business analytics software that offers an integrated, end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System. |
 | Business Process Management is a complete set of tools for creating, executing, and optimizing business processes. |
 | Database is a multi-model database management system often used for running online transaction processing, data warehousing and mixed database workloads. |
 | JDeveloper covers the full development lifecycle from design through coding, debugging, optimization and profiling to deploying. |
| OC4J (Oracle Containers for J2EE) is a slimmed down version of Oracle Application Server. |
 | MySQL is a relational database management system. It runs as a server and allows multiple users to manage and create numerous databases. |
 | Siebel CRM delivers a combination of transactional, analytical, and engagement features to manage all customer-facing operations. |
 | TopLink is a mapping and persistence framework for Java developers. It is an object-persistence and object-transformation framework. |
| Web Cache is a secure reverse proxy cache and a compression engine deployed between a browser and web server/content management server. |