I’m using Spring Boot 3.x, and the @Cacheable annotation is working on methods that are not public. This is strange because the documentation clearly states:

Method visibility and cache annotations

When you use proxies, you should apply the cache annotations only to methods with public visibility. If you do annotate protected, private, or package-visible methods with these annotations, no error is raised, but the annotated method does not exhibit the configured caching settings. Consider using AspectJ (see the rest of this section) if you need to annotate non-public methods, as it changes the bytecode itself.

Here is my sample service:

@Service
public class CacheService {

    @Cacheable("cache1")
    String foo() {
        System.out.println("string");
        return "string";
    }
}

And a very simple test:

@SpringBootTest
class ApplicationTests {
    @Autowired
    private CacheService cacheService;

    @Test
    void test2() {
        cacheService.foo();
        cacheService.foo();
        cacheService.foo();
        cacheService.foo();
        cacheService.foo();
        cacheService.foo();
    }

}

In Spring Boot 2.7, the console output shows 6 “string” messages, but in 3.0.0 (and above), it only shows 1 “string”.

Do you have any idea what changed, and where in the documentation this behavior is described?

This came up during a company presentation, and I was confident I understood the behavior of this annotation, so I’m looking for arguments to justify it 🙂

EDIT

Here’s the example with branch spring-2.7 and spring-3.0.