Web applications are typically accessed by many concurrent users. Usually, the application's data is stored in a relational database or filesystem, and it takes time and costs overhead to access these data sources. Database-access bottlenecks can slow down or even crash the application if it receives too many simultaneous requests. Object caching is one technique that overcomes this problem. In this article, Srini Penchikala discusses a simple caching implementation framework he created to cache the lookup data objects in a Web portal project.
Here's where to find a good article on this...
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-05-2004/jw-0531-cache.html
