I have just finished porting a simple Hibernate application to JPA. The same code is used by multiple distributed web applications, each application having the ability to modify and read the *same* database. In the original application we used ehcache to reload objects on a regular basis (every few minutes). What is the best way to achieve this using Hibernate JPA? At the moment, changes made through one web application instance are *never* reflected in the other instances. eg adding a customer through French application instance will not be available in the customer list in the German instance - even though it exists in the database. This was really simple with hibernate + ehcache as the customer object list was refreshed every minute on *all* instances. How can this be achieved using Hibernate JPA? Many thanks in advance!