carbonite

A simple in memory and persistent Object cache for Android.

Carbonite aims to deal with your data POJOs (JavaBeans folks anyone?) without boilerplate code, so you can forget about ORMs, SQLite, Cursors, ContentProviders, etc. for data that you already hold in Objects anyways, plus you want them evicted at some point therefore losing them is not really a big deal, yet you can control how that will happen.

Although it can be used as the only persistence solution on Android, it is not one of carbonite goals to do so, you should evaluate when traditional persistence solutions make more sense based on your problem.

Note: Carbonite is currently under first version development so API and stuff might change among versions.

How does it work?

Carbonite keeps your POJOs in memory while transparently persisting them in background to storage, you can retrieve them later either from memory or loading them asynchronously/synchronously from storage. You can specify how and how long are them kept, for finer control you can provide your own implementations.

Current implementations vary, all of them are stale values prone if you do not use them properly.

TODO provide docs regarding current implementations and how to use them, etc.

Usage

1. Include it in your project. To include carbonite in your Android project you can do it so in your dependecies: At this point only SNAPSHOT versions are available.

#####Gradle

repositories {
  maven { url 'https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/' }
}

dependencies {
   compile 'info.evelio:carbonite:0.1-SNAPSHOT'
}

2. Build your carbonite instance:

  Carbonite.using(context) /* getApplicationContext() is used and not retained */
      .retaining(YourPojo.class)
      .in(MEMORY) /* optional, default */
      .and(STORAGE) /* optional if you don't want to keep in memory */
      /* This can be replaced by just build() */
      .iLoveYou() /* Does nothing */
      .iKnow(); // calls build()

3. Use it:

#####set

  YourPojo data = …
  ...
  carbonite.set("data", data); // will keep it in memory and async persist it to storage

You can also use memory and storage for a blocking way. #####get From memory:

  YourPojo stored = carbonite.memory("data", YourPojo.class);

From storage (blocking):

  YourPojo stored = carbonite.storage("data", YourPojo.class);

From memory (blocking) or storage (async):

  Future<YourPojo> future = carbonite.get("data", YourPojo.class);
  …
  YourPojo stored = future.get();

Notes:

• MEMORY operations will always happen in calling thread as often will be as simple as put/get an item in/from a Map, while STORAGE operations happen asynchronously for set and get and are blocking for storage calls.

Roadmap

This is a raw short term roadmap of features that I'd like to see in Carbonite:

• Document all the public APIs
• A sample app (in progress)
• Help with Carbonite instances hold by life cycle objects (Fragment, Activity, etc.).
• Future listeners so we can remove Future boilerplate, allow callback cleanup for objects with life cycles like the ones mentioned above.
• Auto keys (in POJO -interface, annotations, code generation, hashCode() maybe baby- or using a third object to provide it)
• Bulk operations
• Eviction (allow using weigher, etc. for auto eviction)
  • Some cache implemenations (Like LRU or weak referenced ones) already do this based it is own rules.
• CRUD notifications (e.g. using listeners or events)
• Auto update references (to deal with stale objects)
• Object pooling
• Stats
• Add more cache (in memory/storage TTL, references, etc.) and serialization (JSON, Java Serialization, etc.) implementations.
  • You can provide your own using a CacheFactory or providing CacheOptions on build time.
  • For StorageLruCache you can provide your own Serializer using StorageLruCache.Options.
• Optional unsafe get, retaining, etc. methods without Class param.
• Empty/wrap Objects, instead of returning a Future return an empty instance which will contain the proper data once object is loaded (cons: bug prone pros: happy code without null checks)
• Out of the box support for a Bus (e.g. Otto, EventBus, etc.)

About

Carbonite relies (yet totally optional) on the following awesome open source software:

• kryo
• DiskLruCache

License

Copyright 2013 Evelio Tarazona Cáceres <evelio@evelio.info>
Copyright 2013 Carbonite contributors <contributors@evelio.info>

   Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
   you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
   You may obtain a copy of the License at

       http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

   Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
   distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
   WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
   See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
   limitations under the License.