Using memcache in GAE/J

Actually memcache is not a brand new concept, it has been utilized in many large scale projects. The most famous memcache event will be the Whale in Twitter's front page. To understand the background knowledge of memcache, please Google it. In one sentence, memcache is a way to cache those frequently used data internal or external to reduce the cost of database query and remote invocation. This is a very classical way in dealing with all kinds of database, however since most of the codes are written in low level , most of the developers are out of touch. Here, with the help of memcache, to transplant this idea into the application level, which will definitely be a great boost to large scale applications.

Google App Engine supports memcache for a long time, which should be one of its born advantage. Here I'd like to briefly introduce how to use memcache in GAE/J. Sorry for those who are interested in Python.

First, let's construct a scenario. There is a university system in GAE/J which stores information for around 10k students. Such a system includes all kinds of information for students to use, such as enrollment, study blackboard, course selection and so on. As a result, there will be a huge demand on the database query. However, such kind of demand always falls in two parts, which part of the students who really like the system and would like to log in everyday, another part students who can be considered as "lazy" seldom care about this. As a result, to improve the efficiency of the system. to cache those frequently used information will be a good help. Here we assume there is a table called Student, no matter what kind of action to happen, there is always the need to query the data in Student table. Let's see how memcache to store the Student information.

First we generate a JDO POJO class to store Student information. As an example, the fields in the class are pretty simple.

[java]@PersistenceCapable(identityType = IdentityType.APPLICATION)

@Inheritance(customStrategy = “complete-table”)

public class Student implements Serializable{

@PrimaryKey

@Persistent

private String uuid;

@Persistent

private String name;

@Persistent

private String email;

@Persistent

private String address;

public Student(){

this.uuid = UUID.randomUUID().toString();

//setter&getter

}[/java]

Then we need to construct a Cache class which will in charge of the operations in Cache layer.

[java]

public class QueryCache {

private static final Logger log = Logger.getLogger(QueryCache.class

.getName());

private static QueryCache instance;

private Cache cache;

private QueryCache(){

try{

CacheFactory cacheFactory = CacheManager.getInstance().getCacheFactory();

cache = cacheFactory.createCache(Collections.emptyMap());

}catch(CacheException e){

log.severe(”Error in creating the cache”);

}

}

public static synchronized QueryCache getInstance(){

if(instance==null){

instance = new QueryCache();

}

return instance;

}

public void putInCache(String address, String student){

cache.put(address, student);

}

public String findInCache(String address){

if(cache.containsKey(address)){

return (String)cache.get(address);

}else{

return null;

}

}

}

[/java]

Inside this class, we generate a new Cache instance under the Singleton pattern. A map resides in this class. At the same time, we define two methods, one to put the student information into the cache and another to get the information out of the cache.

Finally, we construct a servlet to query the student information.

public class QueryServlet extends HttpServlet{
private static final Logger log = Logger.getLogger(QueryServlet.class.getName());
@Override
protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResposne resp) throws ServletException, IOException{
log.info(”Now start……”);
QueryCache cache = QueryCache.getInstance();
String studentC = cache.findInCache(”Address7694″);
if(studentC!=null){
resp.getWriter().write(”Found the item in cache!”);
}else{
resp.getWriter().write(”No hit in cache!”);
PersistenceManager pm = PMF.get().getPersistenceManager();
Query query = pm.newQuery(Student.class);
query.setFilter(”address==’Address7694′”);
List students = List query.execute();
if(students.iterator().hasNext()){
log.info(”Found one:”+student.toString());
resp.getWriter().write(”Found one:”+student.toString());
cache.putInCache(”Address7694″, student.toString());
}else{
log.info(”None found!”);
resp.getWriter().write(”None Found!”);
}
}
}

This is a very simple example to briefly show how to use memcache in GAE/J. However, a lot more things need to think about in reality such as where to use memcache, how to set the expire time of each cache, etc.