Using dynamic proxies for cache implementation

The act of storing a copy of data (which is usually expensive to fetch or compute) from the original source, near (ideally, though not necessary) the users is called caching. Once the data is stored in the cache, future use can be made by accessing the cached copy rather than re-fetching or re-computing the original data, so that the average access time is shorter, leading to performance gains. There are various cache implementations in java e.g. EHCache, Memcached etc.

Usually we interleave cache lookup calls for objects in our business logic as shown in following example-

public Employee getEmployee(long id) {
  // See if it is available in cache
  Employee employee = MyCache.get(Long.toString(id));
  if (employee != null)
      return employee;

  // Construct new objects and put in cache
  employee = new Employee(id, "Vinod", "Singh");
  MyCache.put(Long.toString(id), employee);
  return employee;
}

Where we first look in cache for the object and return the same if available. If not found then create the new one and put that in cache before returning to client. This kind of implementation looks superfluous and adds to clutter in the code. In my opinion business classes should concentrate on the relevant logic only and developers should not be bothered about caching. The caching logic should be moved out of business logic and kept at one centralized place and intercept the calls to business logic and take up the task of looking for objects in cache or putting newly created objects in cache. This will provide great flexibility to enable/disable and/or change the caching implementation at will with almost no changes in code. In rest of the post I will try to explain how with the help of dynamic proxies we can separate out the caching code from business logic.

Usually the returned object of some method is the thing what we keep in cache. So let us create an annotation, which can be used on any method to indicate that the returned object needs to be cached.

@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target(ElementType.METHOD)
public @interface Cacheable {
}

The Cacheable annotation will be applied as shown in following example-

public interface HrmItf {

    @Cacheable
    Employee getEmployee(long id);
}

Now create a proxy, which will look for the object in cache or put it in cache whenever a method with @Cacheable annotation is called.

public class CacheProxy implements InvocationHandler {

    private Object obj;

    public static  T newInstance(Class cls, Object obj) {
          return cls.cast(Proxy.newProxyInstance(
                      obj.getClass().getClassLoader(),
                      obj.getClass().getInterfaces(), new CacheProxy(obj)));
    }

    private CacheProxy(Object obj) {
          this.obj = obj;
    }

    @Override
    public Object invoke(Object proxy, Method method, Object[] args)
                throws Throwable {
          // If method is not annotated, don't look in cache
          Cacheable cacheable = method.getAnnotation(Cacheable.class);
          if (cacheable == null)
                return method.invoke(obj, args);

          // try to get from cache
          String key = args[0].toString();
          Object value = MyCache.get(key);
          if (value != null)
                return value;

          // Invoke the actual method and put the result in cache
          value = method.invoke(obj, args);
          MyCache.put(key, value);
          return value;
    }
}

When we get a handle to our business interface, actually we will be get a proxy encapsulating the implementation. Here is how we do that-

public void proxyCacheTest() {
  HrmItf hrm = CacheProxy.newInstance(HrmItf.class, new HrmImpl());
  hrm.getEmployee(1);
}

Now business layer is concerned only about the task it is supposed to do. It looks much cleaner now without any noise.

public Employee getEmployee(long id) {
  return new Employee(id, "Vinod", "Singh");
}

If we want to use the in-process caching solution like EHCache or the distributed one like Memcached or want to disable the cache at all, it is the one place CacheProxy.java where we have to make changes.