What are the best Cache practices in ehcache or spring cache for spring MVC?

Question

Planning to implement cache mechanism for static data in spring web based application, can any one explain which is the best and how it works?

• EhCache
• Spring Cache

Answer 1

Disclaimer : I am a Terracotta / Software AG employee, the maintainers of Ehcache

Ehcache is a JVM caching library, famous for being used as the default 2nd level cache for the Hibernate ORM

Spring cache was introduced in Spring 3.1, and brought annotations such as @CachePut to define uses of caches in a Spring application; by default Spring cache uses a plain Map, but you can configure it to use any popular caching framework, including Ehcache

Since Spring 4.1, Spring cache supports JSR-107, the standard for caching on the JVM.

What that means, is that you can add JSR-107 caching annotations, and then choose your caching library (ehcache 2 or 3 / guava / caffeine / etc.) : you're not tied to any caching vendor, even not tied to Spring cache annotations !

There's this nice blog post explaining the parallel between Spring cache annotations and JSR-107 annotations and if you choose to use Ehcache3 in your spring boot application, there's another interesting blog post explaining you how to integrate it in your app