First Steps With EhCache

If you need to cache objects in your system, Ehcache is a simple cache written in Java, widely used and well tested. I will present here a short tutorial on how to use EhCache for people who don't want to look around the documentation at first, but just want to test if it works in their project and to see how easy it is to setup.

Installation

Download Ehcache from the Download link on http://ehcache.sourceforge.net. Current release is 1.2.

Unpack Ehcache with an unpacker that knows the tgz format. For unix users, it is trivial, for windows users, 7zip is a free (and open-source) unpacker. It is probably the most popular, but there are other ones like tugzip or izarc or winrar.

In your java project you need to have ehcache-1.2.jar, commons-collections-2.1.1.jar and commons-logging-1.0.4.jar (versions numbers may vary) in your classpath, those libraries are shipped with ehcache.

Cache Configuration

Write an ehcache.xml file where you describe what cache you want to use. There can be several files per project, several cache descriptions per file. I use here a persistent cache. Configuration file is well described at http://ehcache.sourceforge.net/documentation/configuration.html

<ehcache>

<cache name="firstcache" maxElementsInMemory="10000" eternal="false" overflowToDisk="true" timeToIdleSeconds="0" timeToLiveSeconds="0" diskPersistent="true" diskExpiryThreadIntervalSeconds="120"/>

</ehcache>

Code

static  {  
 //Create a CacheManager  using a specific  config file  
 cacheManager = CacheManager.create(TestClass.class.getResource( "/config/ehcache.xml"));
 cache = cacheManager.getCache("firstcache");
} 

/**
 * retrieves value  from cache if exists
 * if not  create it and add  it to cache */
public String doit(String key, String value) {
 //get an element  from cache by key
  Element e = cache.get(key);
 if (e != null)    {
   value  = (String)e.getValue();
   LOGGER.info("retrieved "+ value+" from cache ");
 }
  else   {
   value = "new value" ;
   cache.put(new Element(key, value));
 }
  return value;
}

/**
 * refresh value  for given key */
public void refresh(String key) { cache.remove(key); }

/**
 * to call eventually  when your application is  exiting  */
 public void shutdown() { cacheManager.shutdown(); } 

Conclusion

Using EhCache is as simple a using a Java Map with an additional configuration file.