US Patent 7467166 System and method for heterogeneous caching

The caching of heterogeneous sets of bean is accomplished using a single cache. The beans can be identified by generating a unique identifier that is a combination of the bean's primary key and a self-reference identifier of the bean manager associated with that bean. The average size of a bean set associated with a bean manager can be specified such that the cache allocates memory for that set based on the average size. A callback interface can also be used to shift knowledge of a bean life cycle back to the bean manager.