Spring Boot Ehcache

Ehcache is an open source, standards-based cache that boosts performance. It’s the most widely-used Java-based cache because it’s robust, proven, full-featured, and integrates with other popular libraries and frameworks. In this example I will show you how to use Ehcache in a Spring Boot application. NOTE: If you need to know what tools you need to have installed in your computer in order to create a Spring Boot basic project, please refer my previous post: Spring Boot

Then execute this command in your terminal.

spring init --dependencies=web,data-jpa,lombok --language=groovy --build=gradle spring-boot-ehcache

This is the build.gradle file generated:

buildscript {
	ext {
		springBootVersion = '2.0.2.RELEASE'
	}
	repositories {
		mavenCentral()
	}
	dependencies {
		classpath("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:${springBootVersion}")
	}
}

apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'org.springframework.boot'
apply plugin: 'io.spring.dependency-management'

group = 'com.jos.dem.springboot.cache'
version = '0.0.1-SNAPSHOT'
sourceCompatibility = 1.8

repositories {
	mavenCentral()
}


dependencies {
  compile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web'
  compile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-data-jpa'
  compile 'org.projectlombok:lombok'
  testCompile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-test'
}

Then add Ehcache and MySQL dependencies to you build.gradle file.

compile 'net.sf.ehcache:ehcache-core:2.6.11'
compile 'mysql:mysql-connector-java:5.1.34'

Now let’s create an entity to store and retrieve information from our database.

package com.jos.dem.springboot.cache.model;

import javax.persistence.Id;
import javax.persistence.Entity;

import lombok.AllArgsConstructor;
import lombok.NoArgsConstructor;
import lombok.Data;

@Data
@AllArgsConstructor
@NoArgsConstructor
@Entity
public class Person {

  @Id
  private Long id;
  private String nickname;
  private String email;

}

Lombok is a great tool to avoid boilerplate code, for knowing more please go here. Since we are using Spring Data, let’s create a JPA Person repository.

package com.jos.dem.springboot.cache.repository;

import java.util.List;

import org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.JpaRepository;
import com.jos.dem.springboot.cache.model.Person;

public interface PersonRepository extends JpaRepository<Person, Long>{

  Person save(Person person);
  List<Person> findAll();
  void deleteAll();

}

Next, we are going to use CommandLineRunner to save some person entities. The CommandLineRunner is a call back interface in Spring Boot, when Spring Boot starts will call it and pass in args through a run() internal method.

package com.jos.dem.springboot.cache;

import java.util.List;
import java.util.Arrays;

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.boot.CommandLineRunner;
import org.springframework.cache.annotation.EnableCaching;
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;

import com.jos.dem.springboot.cache.model.Person;
import com.jos.dem.springboot.cache.repository.PersonRepository;

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableCaching
public class CacheApplication {

  private List<Person> persons = Arrays.asList(
    new Person(1L, "josdem", "joseluis.delacruz@gmail.com"),
    new Person(2L, "tgrip", "tgrip@email.com"),
    new Person(3L, "edzero", "edzero@email.com"),
    new Person(4L, "jeduan", "jeduan@email.com"),
    new Person(5L, "siedrix", "siedrix@email.com")
  );


  public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication.run(CacheApplication.class, args);
  }

  @Bean
  CommandLineRunner start(PersonRepository personRepository){
    return args -> {
      personRepository.deleteAll();
      persons.forEach(person -> personRepository.save(person));
    };
  }

}

In our spring boot application class we are enabling caching itself with the @EnableCaching annotation. Setting up caching for a controller method is quite easy. Let’s create a PersonController and some method to retrieve all persons, so we can configure cache on it:

package com.jos.dem.springboot.cache.controller;

import java.util.Date;
import java.util.List;

import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.cache.annotation.Cacheable;
import com.jos.dem.springboot.cache.model.Person;
import com.jos.dem.springboot.cache.service.PersonService;

import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

@RestController
public class PersonController {

  private Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(this.getClass());

  @Autowired
  private PersonService personService;

  @RequestMapping("/")
  @Cacheable("persons")
  public List<Person> index(){
    log.info("Getting all persons");
    long start = new Date().getTime();
    List<Person> persons = personService.getAll();
    log.info("Finishing getting all persons at: " + (new Date().getTime() - start) + " milliseconds");
    return persons;
  }

}

Ehcache has a lot configuration options, you can configure the cache size, time to live, if it should overflow to disk, etc. In this example I will just create a simple in memory cache. Create a file called ehcache.xml in the src/main/resources folder:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ehcache xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://www.ehcache.org/ehcache.xsd"
  updateCheck="true" monitoring="autodetect" dynamicConfig="true">

  <cache name="persons"
    maxEntriesLocalHeap="10000" eternal="false"
    timeToIdleSeconds="300" timeToLiveSeconds="600">
  </cache>

</ehcache>

As you can see, we created a <cache> with the name “persons”, with 10,000 items that can be stored in memory and will expire an element if it is idle for more than 5 minutes and lives for more than 10 minutes. To understand more, read this official ehcache.xml example. Next step is to configure Spring Boot to use this configuration file along with the MySQL configuration, please add the following structure in the application.properties:

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/spring_boot_ehcache
spring.datasource.username=username
spring.datasource.password=password
spring.datasource.driver-class-name=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver

spring.jpa.generate-ddl=true

spring.cache.ehcache.config=classpath:ehcache.xml

That’s it, now if you start up your Spring Boot application and hit the index page at: http://localhost:8080/ you will be able to see our cache in action.

[
  {
    "id": 5,
    "nickname": "siedrix",
    "email": "siedrix@email.com"
  },
  {
    "id": 4,
    "nickname": "jeduan",
    "email": "jeduan@email.com"
  },
  {
    "id": 3,
    "nickname": "edzero",
    "email": "edzero@email.com"
  },
  {
    "id": 2,
    "nickname": "tgrip",
    "email": "tgrip@email.com"
  },
  {
    "id": 1,
    "nickname": "josdem",
    "email": "joseluis.delacruz@gmail.com"
  }
]

To browse the project go here, to download the project:

git clone https://github.com/josdem/spring-boot-ehcache.git

To run the project:

gradle bootRun

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