If you're building a Spring application, you might want to use caching to speed things up. In this tutorial, we'll learn how to use the Spring Cache abstraction to add caching to our code.
First, we'll need to add the necessary dependencies to our project. We'll use Maven to manage our dependencies and add the following to our pom.xml file:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-cache</artifactId>
</dependency>
Next, we'll need to configure Spring to use caching. We can do this by adding the @EnableCaching annotation to one of our configuration classes.
@Configuration
@EnableCaching
public class CacheConfig {
}
Now that caching is enabled, we can start caching our data. We'll use the @Cacheable annotation to mark a method that we want to cache. For example, let's say we have a method that returns a list of products from a database:
@Cacheable("products")
public List<Product> getProducts() {
// Code to fetch products from database
}
The "products" value passed to @Cacheable is the name of the cache that we'll be using. If we call this method multiple times, Spring will cache the result to make subsequent calls faster.
We can also use the @CachePut annotation to update the cache. For example, let's say we have a method that adds a new product to the database:
@CachePut("products")
public void addProduct(Product product) {
// Code to add product to database
}
The @CachePut annotation tells Spring to add the new product to the cache so that subsequent calls to getProducts() will include the new product.
Finally, we can use the @CacheEvict annotation to remove items from the cache. For example, let's say we have a method that deletes a product from the database:
@CacheEvict("products")
public void deleteProduct(long productId) {
// Code to delete product from database
}
The @CacheEvict annotation tells Spring to remove the deleted product from the cache so that subsequent calls to getProducts() won't include the deleted product.
That's it! With just a few annotations, we've added caching to our Spring application. Caching can help speed up our application by reducing the number of times we need to fetch data from a slow data source like a database.