Client cache for services in an SOA platform

Question

We have an SOA based platform which consists many services and set of apps utilizing the services. Each service exposes its functionality through a client which becomes part of host app and invokes the service.

To reduce number of network calls, I have created a client cache framework where objects are cached in the client layer. Client routinely polls the service to check what objects have been changed and invalidates the cache accordingly. SO the incoming requests are served from the client cache in most of the cases, service call is made only when client cache does not contain requested item.

My problem is that if I have 10 different apps which are dependent on a particular service/client, the same cache will be replicated in all the apps, which seems too much redundancy and each app will have a larger memory footprint.

What are my options here?

Answer 1

You can set a "front-end" or proxy for the service that will reside on the same machine with the applications. It can expose the same API of the remote service and utilize the cache inside it. If you use something like OSGI you can still deploy that as an independent component