/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
 * or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
 * distributed with this work for additional information
 * regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
 * to you 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.
 */
package org.apache.ki.cache;

/**
 * A CacheManager provides and maintains the lifecycles of {@link Cache Cache} instances.
 *
 * <p>Ki doesn't implement a full Cache mechanism itself, since that is outside the core competency of a
 * Security framework.  Instead, this interface provides an abstraction (wrapper) API on top of an underlying
 * cache framework's main Manager component (e.g. JCache, Ehcache, JCS, OSCache, JBossCache, TerraCotta, Coherence,
 * GigaSpaces, etc, etc), allowing a Ki user to configure any cache mechanism they choose.
 *
 * @author Les Hazlewood
 * @since 0.9
 */
public interface CacheManager {

    /**
     * Acquires the cache with the specified <code>name</code>.  If a cache does not yet exist with that name, a new one
     * will be created with that name and returned.
     *
     * @param name the name of the cache to acquire.
     * @return the Cache with the given name
     * @throws CacheException if there is an error acquiring the Cache instance.
     */
    public Cache getCache(String name) throws CacheException;
}