Tersus: Freemarker templates, and caching

Freemarker templates, and caching Date: Mar 14, 2007As part of the development of the Tersus web site application, we're adding support for creating text from templates using the Freemarker library
. When working with Freemarker, it is important to cahce the processed templates because the initial processing of templates is relatively expensive.Freemarker has an internal mechanism for loading caching template, but it appears that for Tersus it makes sense to extract the caching to an independent plugin.I plan to do the following:

Create an plugin that coverts a text to a freemarker template.

Modify "Create Text from Template" so that it can receive processed templates.

Later - add a generic caching mechanism that will enable us to store and retrieve arbitrary objects.
I'll probably use Apache's Java Caching System or another existing open source caching library. All we need from the caching library is the ability to retrieve and store and object (with its modification time). Once we have the modification time we can check in the database whether a newer version of the record exists, and if so replace the cached object.