...use Infinispan caches with SwitchYard

Sometimes, when developing SwitchYard services you might need to develop certain functionality where a cache could probably provide you with great benefit, things like:

• Clustered configuration
• Clustered storage of information
• Clustered synchronization service

We are lucky that we can use Infinispan cache with SwitchYard, as it is in the application server, and if you are using FSW you are entitled to use it for your applications, and you do not need an additional entitlement for JDG.

Here, I’m going to explain very briefly what are the parts you need to take into ocnsideration in order to make use of Infinispan. The rest, what to do with the cache, then falls down on your side.

Configuration

Wildfly and EAP brings into their configuration the infinispan subsystem, where you can define you own cache containers. A cache container is a logical grouping of caches, that will be registered and accesible through JNDI for your application to use. There are multiple configuration that you can set per container, and per cache in a container, and you should check Infinispan configuration for all the available options, but the section you can/should configure is like this:

<subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:infinispan:1.4">
   ....
   <cache-container name="switchyard" default-cache="default" start="EAGER">
       <transport lock-timeout="60000"/>
       <replicated-cache name="default" mode="SYNC" start="EAGER" batching="true">
           <locking isolation="REPEATABLE_READ"/>
       </replicated-cache>
   </cache-container>
   <cache-container name="mycustomcache" default-cache="cacheA" start="EAGER">
       <transport lock-timeout="60000"/>
       <distributed-cache name="cacheA" l1-lifespan="1000" mode="ASYNC" batching="true">
           <eviction strategy="LRU" max-entries="1000"/>
       </distributed-cache>
       <distributed-cache name="cacheB" l1-lifespan="0" mode="ASYNC" batching="true">
           <eviction strategy="LRU" max-entries="10000"/>
           <file-store/>
       </distributed-cache>
   </cache-container>
</subsystem>

Keep in mind, that you will be required to start the server with a -ha profile to have replication and jgroups started, otherwise you will only have local caches.

Usage

The first thing you need to do in your application is to inject the CacheContainer. As the CacheContainer is registered in JNDI, it can easily be injected as a Resource in the java:jboss/infinispan/container/CACHE_CONTAINER name.

@Resource(lookup = "java:jboss/infinispan/container/switchyard")
private CacheContainer container;

Once you have the cache container, you need the concrete cache for your use. In the example configuration above, there are 2 caches defined (cacheA, cacheB). You can get a reference to the cache through the CacheManager. This can be done once, if you set your component as ApplicationScoped, or every time, or using a Singleton, or any other pattern.

private Cache<String, String> cache;
...
this.cache = this.container.getCache();

And now you can use your cache to store/retrieve information.

cache.put(KEY, value);
cache.putIfAbsent(KEY, value, 10L, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
cache.get(KEY);
cache.remove(KEY);
....

Check out the complete Infinispan documentation or the API.

Remember to check the version of Infinispan for the application server you are using. If FSW, this is 5.2.7.Final.

Check out some sample application.