Ehcache is a standards-based caching API that is used by Integration Server. Caching enables an application to fetch frequently used data from memory (or other nearby resource) rather than having to retrieve it from a database or other back-end system each time the data is needed.

Ehcache is designed to support multiple deployment configurations, including those that enable you to create very large in-memory caches and share caches across multiple Integration Servers.

Integration Server, and Software AG components that run on Integration Server, use Ehcache to cache data associated with many of their own internal operations. Additionally, Integration Server provides a set of public services (in the pub.cache folder in the WmPublic package) that developers can use to add caching capabilities to the solutions that they build. For example, a service that frequently reads data from a sales catalog might cache all or part of that catalog to avoid having to query the database each time it needs information about a catalog item. Because accessing data from memory is as much as 1,000 times faster than retrieving it from a database, developers can dramatically improve the performance of a service by caching the data that it uses.

This chapter provides a broad overview of the caching capabilities provided by Ehcache. For a more detailed explanation of these features, see the Ehcache product documentation.