Cache::Cache 1.05

Cache::Cache Perl module contains the Cache interface.

The Cache modules are designed to assist a developer in persisting data for a specified period of time. Often these modules are used in web applications to store data locally to save repeated and redundant expensive calls to remote machines or databases. People have also been known to use Cache::Cache for its straightforward interface in sharing data between runs of an application or invocations of a CGI-style script or simply as an easy to use abstraction of the filesystem or shared memory.

The Cache::Cache interface is implemented by classes that support the get, set, remove, size, purge, and clear instance methods and their corresponding static methods for persisting data across method calls.

USAGE

First, choose the best type of cache implementation for your needs. The simplest cache is the MemoryCache, which is suitable for applications that are serving multiple sequential requests, and wish to avoid making redundant expensive queries, such as an Apache/mod_perl application talking to a database. If you wish to share that data between processes, then perhaps the SharedMemoryCache is appropriate, although its behavior is tightly bound to the underlying IPC mechanism, which varies from system to system, and is unsuitable for large objects or large numbers of objects.

When the SharedMemoryCache is not acceptable, then FileCache offers all of the same functionality with similar performance metrics, and it is not limited in terms of the number of objects or their size. If you wish to maintain a strict limit on the size of a file system based cache, then the SizeAwareFileCache is the way to go. Similarly, the SizeAwareMemoryCache and the SizeAwareSharedMemoryCache add size management functionality to the MemoryCache and SharedMemoryCache classes respectively.

Using a cache is simple. Here is some sample code for instantiating and using a file system based cache.

use Cache::FileCache;

my $cache = new Cache::FileCache( );

my $customer = $cache->get( $name );

if ( not defined $customer )
{
$customer = get_customer_from_db( $name );
$cache->set( $name, $customer, "10 minutes" );
}

return $customer;