Is it possible to use Oracle Coherence to provide distributed caching to an ASP.NET application?
We would like to use Coherence to scale out an ASP.NET application which does not have distributed caching. Alternatives would be memcached, etc. However, we are considering Coherence since we already have licensing/expertise in that area.
Absolutely -- if you already have Coherence licenses, you only need to download Coherence for .NET client library, which will allow you to connect to the cluster from any .NET application, including ASP.NET.
You can also use Coherence for HTTP session clustering using built-in session provider.
If your question is still relevant:
The simple answer is yes. I have not used Oracle Coherence myself (mainly because the licensing makes it uninteresting for my company) but it definitely seems like a competent solution for ASP.NET applications. I have taken a look at it when evaluating a couple of distributed caching solutions, and I would say it's one of four solutions that seem really interesting that's targeting .NET.
You might want to check out Microsoft AppFabric Caching, ScaleOut StateServer and Alachisoft NCache as well. They all support ASP.NET Session state and have good .NET client APIs according to my experience. Which caching solution to choose depends on what you want your distributed cache to do, let me know if I can be of any help.