How to store a cache in the Tomcat's Context using Spring?

[Mike London]

I may not be asking the question exactly right, but is it possible to store a cache (HashTable, or something similar) in Tomcat's memory that would be outside any running webapps?

Since we're creating a bunch of webapps that would all benefit from a cache, we want that cache to be outside any of the web apps so it would persist.

This is probably simple to do in Spring, but I was just wondering how practical it is and how you would remove the cache when needed without restarting Tomcat.

Any suggestions on how to implement this?

Thanks in advance.

- mike

[Edson Cezar]

I believe this link is a beginning to you:

Caching in Tomcat – SOLVED!

[Ulf Dittmer]

Caching in Tomcat

That talks mostly about web caching (as opposed to caching in general used by web apps). My preferred approach would be to do that outside of Tomcat, using something like Redis.

[Edson Cezar]

Ulf Dittmer wrote:

Caching in Tomcat

That talks mostly about web caching (as opposed to caching in general used by web apps). My preferred approach would be to do that outside of Tomcat, using something like Redis.

I didn't know about Redis, Thanks !

[Bill Gorder]

Not completely sure I am following but I don't think Spring offers anything along the lines of a global cache shared among all web applications running on a server. If it needs to persist Ulf might be on the right track with something like Redis, or you could look at ehcache or similar as well.

Spring does offer a cache abstraction through the use of the @Cacheable annotation but it still needs to be backed by the cache storage which out of the box can be either ehcache or a concurrent map.

More on that here:
http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/3.2.6.BUILD-SNAPSHOT/spring-framework-reference/htmlsingle/#cache-annotations