How It Works

How It Works

Most of the caching frameworks have the not up-to-date issue, they just limiting to cache a result for a given period of time. So if you have to invalidate the cache, you must do it manually.

That's the not ordinary part of CacheAware, it does that magically. The purpose of this document is to explaining how the magic is done.

Overview

CacheAware works intercepting calls each @CacheAwareFactory annotated method and collects all entities used inside its execution. Then assumes that all those collected entities are involved (or part) of that method result.
So if any of them changes, there is no warranty the cached result is up-to-date and therefore is invalidated.

A couple of questions arise from the above statement:

• What is consider an entity?
• What means a entity changes?
• How entities are collected?

That will be answered soon, but lets introduce a few concepts first.

Basic Concepts

CacheAware distinguishes between tree kind on objects:

1. entities: any object that implements the interface Cacheable
2. inmutables: referes to particular kind of objects (classes to be specific) that are not entities, but participates in the construction of the result (the one to be cached).
   A good example will be the java.util.Locale class. Imagine you want to cache the result of a method which produces a localized result. Obviously, the English version must to be different from the Spanish version, so the Locale takes part on the construction of the response. But Locale could not be an entity because it cannot change it's state (en_US will be always en_US). So, it's not an entity, its a inmutable, and influences the result, just like entities does.