Cacheable methods with the Spring cache

While the caching layer provided as part of Hibernate unlocks easy and convenient caching for high-frequency or high-cost data, caching at a higher level, or more generally, method calls, can be expensive too.

Newer versions of the Spring framework (since version 3.1) feature the ability to transparently cache method calls and their returned results through the use of the com.hazelcast.spring.cache.HazelcastCacheManager class, and its registration as a Spring cache manager.

<cache:annotation-driven cache-manager="cacheManager" />

<bean id="cacheManager"
  class="com.hazelcast.spring.cache.HazelcastCacheManager">

  <constructor-arg ref="hzInstance"/>
</bean>

With this in place, we can then mark appropriate methods as @Cacheable, and where required, use @CacheEvict to trigger cache invalidations.