Declarative XML-based Caching
If annotations are not an option (perhaps due to having no access to the sources or no external code), you can use XML for declarative caching. So, instead of annotating the methods for caching, you can specify the target method and the caching directives externally (similar to the declarative transaction management advice). The example from the previous section can be translated into the following example:
<!-- the service we want to make cacheable -->
<bean id="bookService" class="x.y.service.DefaultBookService"/>
<!-- cache definitions -->
<cache:advice id="cacheAdvice" cache-manager="cacheManager">
<cache:caching cache="books">
<cache:cacheable method="findBook" key="#isbn"/>
<cache:cache-evict method="loadBooks" all-entries="true"/>
</cache:caching>
</cache:advice>
<!-- apply the cacheable behavior to all BookService interfaces -->
<aop:config>
<aop:advisor advice-ref="cacheAdvice" pointcut="execution(* x.y.BookService.*(..))"/>
</aop:config>
<!-- cache manager definition omitted -->
In the preceding configuration, the bookService
is made cacheable. The caching semantics
to apply are encapsulated in the cache:advice
definition, which causes the findBooks
method to be used for putting data into the cache and the loadBooks
method for evicting
data. Both definitions work against the books
cache.
The aop:config
definition applies the cache advice to the appropriate points in the
program by using the AspectJ pointcut expression (more information is available in
Aspect Oriented Programming with Spring). In the preceding example,
all methods from the BookService
are considered and the cache advice is applied to them.
The declarative XML caching supports all of the annotation-based model, so moving between
the two should be fairly easy. Furthermore, both can be used inside the same application.
The XML-based approach does not touch the target code. However, it is inherently more
verbose. When dealing with classes that have overloaded methods that are targeted for
caching, identifying the proper methods does take an extra effort, since the method
argument is not a good discriminator. In these cases, you can use the AspectJ pointcut
to cherry pick the target methods and apply the appropriate caching functionality.
However, through XML, it is easier to apply package or group or interface-wide caching
(again, due to the AspectJ pointcut) and to create template-like definitions (as we did
in the preceding example by defining the target cache through the cache:definitions
cache
attribute).