Memoization

"An optimization technique used primarily to speed up computer programs by having function calls avoid repeating the calculation of results for previously-processed inputs". Memoization on Wikipedia.

Tom White provides memoization implementations for Java in his post here. There is an option utilising the Decorator pattern or Dynamic Proxy Classes (below)

import java.lang.reflect.InvocationHandler;
import java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException;
import java.lang.reflect.Method;
import java.lang.reflect.Proxy;
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.Collections;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Map;

public class Memoizer implements InvocationHandler {
  public static Object memoize(Object object) {
      return Proxy.newProxyInstance(
        object.getClass().getClassLoader(),
        object.getClass().getInterfaces(),
        new Memoizer(object)
      );
  }

  private Object object;
  private Map caches = new HashMap();

  private Memoizer(Object object) {
      this.object = object;
  }

  public Object invoke(Object proxy, Method method,
  Object[] args) throws Throwable {

      if (method.getReturnType().equals(Void.TYPE)) {
          // Don't cache void methods
          return invoke(method, args);
      } else {
          Map cache    = getCache(method);
          List key     = Arrays.asList(args);
          Object value = cache.get(key);

          if (value == null && !cache.containsKey(key)) {
              value = invoke(method, args);
              cache.put(key, value);
          }
          return value;
      }
  }

  private Object invoke(Method method, Object[] args)
  throws Throwable {
      try {
          return method.invoke(object, args);
      } catch (InvocationTargetException e) {
          throw e.getTargetException();
      }
  }

  private synchronized Map getCache(Method m) {
      Map cache = (Map) caches.get(m);
      if (cache == null) {
          cache = Collections.synchronizedMap(
            new HashMap()
          );
          caches.put(m, cache);
      }
      return cache;
  }
}