CacheBox

The more I think about this, the more I feel it really needs to be done...

Everyone is reinventing the wheel here, including myself... and frankly, it's silly...

There are currently 2 separate projects on RIAforge running in parallel for integrating memcached in ColdFusion, plus nearly every other framework includes some kind of caching features. Off the top of my head, Transfer, ColdSpring, Lightwire, Mach-II, ColdBox, the onTap framework and probably Reactor ... and that's just the *short* list. And it doesn't even include several other caching projects on RIAForge.

I plan to beg/borrow/steal or do whatever it's going to take to get the best, most scalable caching algorithms currently implemented in any of these open-source projects (which are probably not mine) and export them in much the same way I've been exporting the DataFaucet ORM into a separate project. This new project is called CacheBox. The system will include a "service" component and a "client" component that will automatically detect the presence of the service and when unavailable fall back on a more naive caching algorithm. Once this is done, all frameworks should be able to implement CacheBox internally to manage their cache.

What does this mean? The question of caching will no longer be a question when choosing frameworks. You'll never have to worry about it, because all the frameworks will have the best possible caching architecture available and have the same kind of flexible caching configuration. You'll never have to worry about the scalability of your caching system, whether it leaks or how to purge the cache. The most you'll ever need to do is tweak the configuration. Small apps can grow and when they become large apps that need the support of something like memcached, you can add that support in the background *without* editing them.