Spring Boot Cache with Example

Introduction:

Caching is a powerful technique used to improve the performance of applications by storing frequently accessed data in memory. Spring Boot provides easy-to-use caching abstractions that seamlessly integrate with popular caching providers such as Ehcache, Redis, Caffeine, and others. In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to use caching in a Spring Boot application with an example.

Prerequisites

1. Basic understanding of Spring Boot and Spring Framework.
2. JDK installed on your machine.
3. Maven or Gradle installed to manage dependencies.
4. IDE (Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, etc.) for writing and running the application.

Step 1: Setup a Spring Boot Project

First, let’s create a new Spring Boot project using Spring Initializr. You can use either Maven or Gradle as your build tool. Include the dependencies for Spring Web and Spring Cache.

Alternatively, you can add the dependencies manually to your pom.xml or build.gradle.

Step 2: Configure Cache in Spring Boot

In Spring Boot, configuring caching is straightforward. You can either use annotations or configure caching through Java Config.

Option 1: Using Annotations

Spring provides annotations such as @EnableCaching and @Cacheable to enable caching and cache the results of methods, respectively.

Option 2: Java Config

Alternatively, you can configure caching using Java Config. This gives more flexibility in configuring cache managers and other properties.

Step 3: Create a Service with Cached Method

Let’s create a simple service that simulates fetching data from a slow data source, and we’ll cache the results using Spring’s caching annotations.

Step 4: Create a Controller to Access the Cached Method

Now, let’s create a controller to expose the getBookByIsbn method from our BookService.

Step 5: Run and Test the Application

You can now run your Spring Boot application. Once the application is running, you can access the /book endpoint with different ISBNs to see the caching in action. You should notice that for the same ISBN, the response time is significantly reduced after the first call due to caching.

That’s it! You’ve successfully implemented caching in a Spring Boot application.

Conclusion

Caching is a crucial technique for improving application performance, and Spring Boot provides convenient abstractions to integrate caching seamlessly into your applications. In this tutorial, we covered how to enable caching, configure caching options, and use caching annotations to cache method results. You can further explore advanced caching features and integrate with different caching providers as per your application requirements.