Pragmatic Caching – a simple Cache Configuration Model for Spring

Caching is a widely used instrument when it comes to performance tuning a given application (of course not until you’ve measured the real bottlenecks). For example, you may want to cache objects that are expensive to fetch (i.e. an object graph from database) or to calculate. Whereas most of us have used a kind of Map to ‘cache’ some data on ad hoc basis in the past, there are a couple of mature caching solutions at the market in the meantime that offer sophisticated features for caching, which goes beyond simply holding objects in memory (e.g. Thread pool controls, Element grouping, Remote server chaining (or clustering), failover, …) Deciding to use such a cache solution always comes with the question of the resulting complexity impact when applying ‘cache logic’ to your application.