Issue
I am implementing an HTTP API using the Spring MVC framework.
I want to store some data between requests and between sessions. The data needs to be readable and modifiable by multiple requests in completely independent sessions, but it only needs to exist in-memory while the application is running, it does not need to be persisted to a database, and it does not need to be shared between any scaled-up, multi-node, multi-process server backend design, just one per (e.g.) Tomcat instance is completely fine. Consider for example a cache or something logging some short-lived metrics about the application-specific data coming in through the requests.
I am assuming the usual way would be to use an in-memory database or something like Redis. However, this being my first venture into web stuff and coming from c++ parallel computing personally, this seems like an extremely over-engineered and inefficient solution to me.
Can I not just create a singleton bean containing a ConcurrentHashMap of my required types, inject it as a dependency into my Controller, and be done with it? I never see anyone talk about this anywhere, even though it seems to be the simplest solution by far to me. Is there something about how Spring MVC or Tomcat works that makes this impossible?
Solution
Basically, yes. "A singleton ConcurrentHashMap" can be used as a cache.
But, I'd go with something that works like a map but has an API that is specifically tailored to caches. Fortunately, such a thing exists.
Guava is a 'general utilities' project (just a bunch of useful utility classes, lots of em now seem a bit pointless, in the sense that java.util and co have these too, but guava is over 10 years old, and everything it has didn't exist back then) - and one of the most useful things it has is a 'Cache' class. It's a Map with bonus features.
I strongly suggest you use it and follow its API designs. It's got a few things that map doesn't have:
- You can set up an eviction system; various strategies are available. You can allow k/v pairs to expire X milliseconds after being created, or optionally X milliseconds after the last time they were read. Or simply guarantee that the cache will never exceed some set size, removing the least recently accessed (or written - again, your choice) k/v pair if needed.
- The obvious 'get a value' API call isn't
.get()like with map, it's a variant where you provide the key as well as a computation function that would calculate the value; the Cache object will just return the cache value if it exists, but if not, it will run the computation, store it in the cache, and return that. Making your life a lot easier, you just call the get method, pass in the key and the computer, and continue, not having to care about whether the computation function is used or not. - You get some control over concurrent calculations too - if 2 threads simultaneously end up wanting the value for key K which isn't in the cache, should both threads just go compute it, or should one thread be paused to wait for the other's calculation? That's also not entirely trivial to write in a ConcurrentHashMap.
- Some fairly fancy footwork - weak keying/valuing: You can set things up such that if the key is garbage collected, the k/v pair gets evicted (eventually) too. This is tricky (string keys don't really work here, for example, and sometimes your value refers to your key in which case the existence of the value would mean your key can't be GCed, making this principle worthless - so you need to design your key and value classes carefully), but can be very powerful.
I believe you can also get just the guava cache stuff on its own, but if not - you know where to look: Add guava as a dependency to your project, fire up an instance of CacheBuilder, read the javadocs, and you're off :)
Answered By - rzwitserloot
Answer Checked By - Timothy Miller (JavaFixing Admin)
