I've recently come across the phrase "multi-tier cache" relating to multi-tiered architectures, but without a meaningful explanation of what such a cache would be (or how it would be used).
Relevant online searches for that phrase don't really turn up anything either. My interpretation would be a cache servicing all tiers of some n-tier web app. Perhaps a distributed cache with one cache node on each tier.
Has SO ever come across this term before? Am I right? Way off?
After playing around with EhCache for a few weeks it is still not perfectly clear what they mean by the term "multi-tier" cache. I will follow up with what I interpret to be the implied meaning; if at any time down the road someone comes along and knows otherwise, please feel free to answer and I'll remove this one.
A multi-tier cache appears to be a replicated and/or distributed cache that lives on 1+ tiers in an n-tier architecture. It allows components on multiple tiers to gain access to the same cache(s). In EhCache, using a replicated or distributed cache architecture in conjunction with simply referring to the same cache servers from multiple tiers achieves this.