Introduction to QIKS

As a developer, I'm always excited to create new tools that combine the power of simplicity with the flexibility to solve real-world problems. Over the past few months, I've been working on a variety of tools that tackle different areas of development. For example, I created Gland, a lightweight framework inspired by Express, and MD-Logger, a simple and efficient logging library. I've also worked on projects like TideityIQ (tdq) to explore new ways to improve productivity and performance.

But after nearly a week of trying to code and a few months of research into caching techniques, I'm proud to introduce my latest project: QIKS!

QIKS is a modern, high-performance caching library designed to be easy to use, flexible, and extendable. It offers a range of useful features that make it ideal for caching in JavaScript and TypeScript applications. Whether you're building a small project or a complex application, QIKS can help you manage data efficiently, reduce latency, and improve your application's performance.

Key Features of QIKS

• In-Memory Caching: QIKS provides a fast, simple in-memory cache that stores key-value pairs in a hash map. This basic caching mechanism helps you quickly store and retrieve data.

• TTL (Time-to-Live) Support: With TTL support, cache items automatically expire after a specified duration. This ensures that outdated data doesn't remain in memory longer than necessary.

• Serialization and Custom Serialization Support: QIKS supports JSON serialization out-of-the-box and allows you to plug in custom serializers to handle more complex data types.

• Namespaces: Organize your cache into different namespaces for better separation and modularity. Each namespace acts as a distinct cache, helping you avoid key collisions in larger applications.

• Cache Events: QIKS emits events for common cache operations such as set, get, delete, and expire. This feature helps you track cache state changes and integrate caching into your application's flow seamlessly.

• Customizable Eviction Policies: QIKS comes with built-in eviction strategies like LRU (Least Recently Used), LFU (Least Frequently Used), and MRU (Most Recently Used). You can configure your cache to evict items based on usage patterns, ensuring that your cache always holds the most valuable data.

• Cache Dependency Management: You can set dependencies between cache items, so when one item is deleted, all dependent items are automatically removed. This helps keep your cache consistent.

• Key Observers: This feature allows you to observe changes to specific cache keys and respond to those changes accordingly. For example, you can set up a listener to trigger an action when a cache item is updated or expired.

• Stale-While-Revalidate (SWR) Strategy: Implement the SWR strategy to serve stale data while fetching fresh data in the background. This helps ensure that your application remains fast, even when fetching new data.

• Priority-Based Caching: With priority-based caching, you can assign priorities to cache items. Higher-priority items are less likely to be evicted, ensuring that critical data remains available in the cache.

Simple Example

Here's a basic example of how you can use QIKS in your project:

import { Qiks } from '@medishn/qiks';

// Create a new cache instance
const cache = new Qiks<string, any>({ maxSize: 5 });

// Set some values in the cache
cache.set('user1', { name: 'Alice', age: 30 });
cache.set('user2', { name: 'Bob', age: 25 });

// Retrieve a value from the cache
const user1 = cache.get('user1');
console.log(user1); // Output: { name: 'Alice', age: 30 }

// Evict a value
cache.delete('user1');

// Check if the item was evicted
const evictedUser = cache.get('user1');
console.log(evictedUser); // Output: undefined

Installation

To get started with QIKS, you can install it via npm:

npm install @medishn/qiks

For more details, check out the QIKS GitHub repository or browse through the documentation and examples.

Why QIKS?

QIKS is designed to make caching easy and efficient. Unlike many other caching libraries, QIKS is built with flexibility in mind. You can customize almost every aspect of caching, from eviction policies to the TTL of items, making it perfect for a wide range of applications.

Whether you're working on a small project or a large-scale web app, QIKS is the perfect choice to manage your cache in a fast and flexible way.

Feel free to explore the QIKS repository on GitHub, and don't hesitate to contribute if you have any improvements or ideas.

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I'm excited to see how QIKS can help optimize your projects. Try it out and let me know what you think!