Not sure if anyone remembers that some time ago I moved all the caching code into the zm_page_cache plugin. That is, all code but the class ZMCache. I was reluctant to move that class as ir provides some basic caching for everyone to use.

However, right now I am in the position to need some caching and it turns out things are not that simple. Well, maybe they are, but it’s not as nice as it could be.

There are mainly tow reasons:

• If each plugin is responsible for it’s own caching only, there will be a growing number of Cache Manager plugin pages, one for each plugin.
• Should there be different caching options (file, memory, etc) there is no easy way for a cache user to take advantage of that. Even worse, it means ZMCache is right now bound to doing file caching.

To remedy this situation and to bring caching more in line with the service infrastructure I’ll be adding another service ZMCache (unless the plural of cache is caches!). This is going to be a cache service that can be queried to get a cache instance that will be what is now ZMCache. I would expect the current ZMCache class to be renamed into something like ZMFileCache.

Another advantage will be that there is no need for individual cache manager pages and it will be much easier to show more cache stats without having to modify each and every plugin that uses caching.

Also, this might be a good way to use more caching in ZenMagick core. For example, some of the more time consuming things like validation rules, etc could be serialized and cached, rather than building them from scratch for every request.

Other thoughts?