Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again.Recently at work I was involved in implementing a distributed cache with Coherence to improve performance with a third party web service. Integrating the call to the web service with the cache was not difficult, however I did encounter a twist in that calls to the web service required information which, while tracked by that service, did not in any way affect the result we got back from the service. In other words, only part of the key was needed to correctly retrieve a value from the cache, however all of the key was needed to create the value to add to the cache.
- "The Dunwich Horror", H.P. Lovecraft
My first thought was that this would be simple to deal with since all Coherence caches are ultimately just extensions of
java.util.Map. If we defined the equals and hashCode methods using just the properties relevant to retrieving items from the cache we could have the best of both worlds: the data would be present when needed to call the external web service and the cache would not include redundant entries. However this did not work, and the particulars of why and what I did to fix things are the topics for this post.