I'm wondering : Hibernate comes with 2 JbossCache providers : TreeCache and OptimisticTreeCache. The second one can be used only inside application server. I'm developing a standalone application which puprose is to test different 2nd level caching mechanisms availaible for Hibernate. So I am using TreeCacheProvider. CacheConcurrencyStrategy is TRANSACTIONAL. Database isolation level : Repeatable_read. And my question is: is TreeCache working in above config, really locking elems etc., or, due to lack of mamnaged environment, treecache behaves like NonStrictReadWrite?