= Easycache

Easycache lets you easily cache arbitrary data in your Ruby on Rails 
applications. The plugin makes use of Rails' built-in fragment caching 
mechanism to store and retrieve any serializable data. This is especially
useful when you want to store data from external sources like LDAP or Web
Services, for which Rails does not currently offer an integrated caching 
mechanism.

Visit http://code.google.com/p/easycache/ for more information.

=== INSTALLATION

From the command line, cd into your Rails application's root directory 
and run:

ruby script/plugin install http://easycache.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

=== EXAMPLES

Once you've installed the plugin, you should be able to do something 
like this anywhere in your application (in controllers, helpers, etc.):

  foo = ['alpha', 'beta', 'delta', 'gamma']

  # store foo in the cache under the keyname 'greek'
  Easycache.write('greek', foo)

  # retrieve the data stored under keyname 'greek'
  foo = Easycache.read('greek')

  # delete the data stored under keyname 'greek'
  Easycache.delete('greek')

In practice, you will probably want to use caching transparently, so 
that data is pulled from the cache if available, or from the original 
source otherwise. For example, say you have a function fetch_some_data_from_LDAP 
that does a slow LDAP query to retrieve some data. To do this, you would use 
Easycache's cache method which takes a keyname and a block. If the cache has 
an entry for the keyname, then the entry will be returned from cache; otherwise 
the block will be executed and its return value will be stored in the cache 
and returned.

  data = Easycache.cache('ldap_data') do
    fetch_some_data_from_LDAP
  end

The first time the above code runs, it will execute fetch_some_data_from_LDAP
and assign the returned value to data. But the next time it's run, the return
value will have come from the cache, so the block won't need to be executed.