When Infinispan meets CDI

Since version 5.0 (Pagoa) Infinispan has a new module. This module is a portable CDI extension which integrates Infinispan with the CDI programming model. Here are some highlights of what is provided:

Please note that this module is a technology preview and its API can still change. Next let’s discuss some of its details.

Typesafe injection and configuration of cache

The first feature you can use out of the box is the typesafe injection of the Cache and the CacheManager. Without any configuration you can inject the default cache, as well as the cache manager used by the extension. This injection can be performed in any bean managed by Java EE like EJB, Servlet and CDI beans. The only thing to do is to use the @Inject annotation:

Please note that the cache injection is typed. In this case, only String typed Java objects could be added as key and value.

It’s also possible to configure the injected cache using CDI. The first step is to create a CDI qualifier, and then create the cache configuration producer, annotated with @ConfigureCache. The qualifier is used to qualify the injection point and the cache configuration producer:

In the same way, a cache can be defined with the default configuration of the cache manager in use, using a producer field:

One advantage of this approach is that all cache configurations of the entire application can be gathered together into a single Configuration class.

The Infinispan CDI extension provides a cache manager with a default configuration (and it is used by default). You can also override the default configuration (used by the default cache manager), as well as the default cache manager. You can find more information here.

JCache annotations support

JCache (aka JSR-107) is famous as the oldest open JSR. However, this JSR has recently seen extensive progress, and is a candidate for inclusion in Java EE 7 (JSR-342).

This specification defines a standard caching API to work with a standalone cache, as well as a distributed cache. An interesting part of the specification are the annotations which are designed to solve common caching use cases. Some of the annotations defined by this specification are:

The following example illustrates the use of these annotations:

The Infinispan CDI extension adds support for these annotations. The only thing to do is to enable the CDI interceptors in your application beans.xml - you can find more information here.

Infinispan CDI and JBoss AS 7

With JBoss AS 7, you can setup an Infinispan cache manager in the server configuration file. This allows you to externalize your Infinispan configuration and also to lookup the cache manager from JNDI, normally with the @Resource annotation. This post has more details on the subject.

As we mentioned earlier, you can override the default cache manager used by the Infinispan CDI extension. To use a JBoss AS 7 configured cache, you need to use the cache manager defined in JBoss AS 7. You only need to annotate the default cache manager producer with @Resource. Simple!

Now, you can inject the cache defined in JBoss AS 7 as we described earlier.

What’s next?

Here is a highlight of the features you will see soon.

As usual you can open issues and features request on the Infinispan JIRA (component CDI Integration).

Feel free to open a topic in the Infinispan forum if you need help.

The Infinispan CDI documentation is here.

To see the Infinispan CDI extension in action you can browse and run the quickstart application here or watch this screencast.

Enjoy!

About the author   Kevin Pollet is a software engineer at SERLI a Consulting & Software Engineering company based in France. He’s an Open Source advocate and contributes on many projects such as Infinispan and Hibernate Validator, both at SERLI and at home. He is also involved in the Poitou-Charentes JUG and has spoken in many JUG events. He enjoys attending Java events like JUDCon, JBoss World and Devoxx.

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