I often lament the lack of a standard caching framework in Java. JSR107 is the JSR for it but it was started in like 2001 and the JCACHE API was finally published in 2005. I just looked at it on java.net and it isn't all that great. I've often longed for a "commons-caching" - a standard client library that could be implemented underneath by the JDK LinkedHashMap, OpenSymphony OSCache, Hibernate ehcache, WhirlyCache(sp?) and I think there are some others (Turbine's JCS??). This is really not hard (and I've done two of those under a common framework for a client).