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

Add Object Caching Using Spring, AOP, and Ehcache

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

This article's example will be a simplified, stripped-down implementation of an ATM locator service. The ATM data you are accessing is located in Spring managed beans. Your data, however, could be from a database, Web service, mainframe, or any disparate system. Keep in mind that the caching technique applied here can easily be added to an any kind of existing system. The only pre-requisite is that your method returns beans that are serializable. Requiring that your beans implement java.io.Serializable is not unreasonable for modern Java applications and should be easy to add if your beans don't already implement the interface.

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.

Home / Articles / Add Object Caching Using Spring, AOP, and Ehcache/ 1

Applet Index
(sorted alphabetically)
A B C D E F G H I J K
L M N O P Q R S T U
V W X Y Z #s

The Java Source
(applets w/source code)
A B C D E F G H I J K
L M N O P Q R S T U
V W X Y Z

How to Add Java Applets to Your Site

New on the Java Boutique:

New Review:

Time Management Made Easy with the Quartz Enterprise Job Scheduler
Why not just use the Java timer API? This open source scheduling API boasts simplicity, ease-of-integration, a well-rounded feature set, and it's free!

New Applet:

Reverse Complement
Reverse Complement is a simple applet that converts DNA or RNA sequences into three useful formats.