One of our first clients for Bootspring is NorthScale, a company specializing in memcached-based infrastructure for scaling large websites. Since I maintain memcache-client, the most popular Ruby client for memcached, they contacted me about building a next generation client. This was kismet as far as I was concerned since I had been wanting to build exactly that for a few months now.

The result is Dalli, named after Salvador Dali and his famous painting The Persistence of Memory. It’s still the new kid on the block, pre-1.0 release, but I’ve already got a great set of users actively testing it on Rails 2.3 and 3.0 and reporting bugs. My goal is to make it a supported cache store out of the box in Rails 3.1.