Creating custom caching annotations

Spring's cache abstraction allows you to create custom caching annotations for your application to recognize the cache method for the cache population or cache eviction. Spring's @Cacheable and @CacheEvict annotations are used as Meta annotations to create custom cache annotation. Let's see the following code for custom annotations in an application:

    @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME) 
    @Target({ElementType.METHOD}) 
    @Cacheable(value="accountCache", key="#account.id") 
    public @interface SlowService { 
    } 

In the preceding code snippet, we have defined a custom annotation named as SlowService, which is annotated with Spring's @Cacheable annotation. If we use @Cacheable in the application, then we have to configure it as the following code:

    @Cacheable(value="accountCache", key="#account.id") 
    public Account findAccount(Long accountId) 

Let's replace the preceding configuration with our defined custom annotation, with the following...