Tutorials : Add Object Caching Using Spring, AOP, and Ehcache :

Add Object Caching Using Spring, AOP, and Ehcache

by Jacob Briscoe

Imagine, if you will, that you have been given an application requirement to access data on an external system on-demand. The aforementioned data changes every 24 hours when the system, is updated. Your users need access to view this data. However, you don't think it's a good idea to always go to the external system to get data that isn't changing, as it is an expensive network operation.

There's a clean solution to this problem that can sit on-top of an already-designed, interface-driven system, minimizing changes. Caching is a cross-cutting aspect that should not be baked into any code-base if you subscribe to the "do one thing and do it well" ethos.

AOP (aspect oriented programming) is a great way to cross-cut an application with caching functionality. AOP, powered by the Spring Framework and using the open source Ehcache object cache library, can give your application a clean and easy to understand caching solution.

This article walks you through the implementation so that you may effectively add object caching within your Web or desktop applications.

Environment Setup

To follow along, download the source code for this article, all of which is written and targeted to work with Java 1.5 (I am currently using 1.5.0_10) but could be easily ported to Java 1.4 or lower. Maven 2 is used for performing library and application builds. If you are still using Ant exclusively for your build system, you should be able to port the pom.xml to Ant. All of the dependencies for this application are listed in the included pom.xml file.

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