I have been trying to implement an "ahead-of-time" caching scheme. Essentially, I have a web app that users interact with to retrieve resources–from a cache if the resource has been requested before, and from elsewhere on a cache miss.
I would like to populate the cache ahead of time. This would look like the user providing specific parameters in the request that will kick the web app off and get it requesting resources and caching them.
The wrinkle in the problem is that if a user requests a specific resource while my web app is requesting resources and caching them, priority needs to be given to the user's request. Once the user has received the resource, the "ahead-of-time" caching should kick back in.
I'm new to servlets, and I have no idea how to make two requests talk like that. How could I "postpone" the operation of some function based off of a separate request to my web app?
I'd be happy to provide any relevant code that you all would find useful. My caching class is almost identical to the one on the JCS website.
Thanks, Kevin