Simple Cache Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Read-path performance budgeting for Eloquent-heavy features. A model-level cache trait directly reduces database round-trips for read-mostly entities (catalogs, settings, reference data, CMS content), which informs whether a feature ships with a caching layer on day one or is deferred to a performance workstream.
• Build vs. buy vs. use-native. The package's entire value is a small trait (~a few hundred lines: Cache::remember wrapping query results plus invalidation on saved/deleted model events). That is a decision point, not a dependency: the PM question is whether to add a third-party trait, write the equivalent in-house in under a day, or lean on Laravel's first-party Cache facade and remember() directly.
• Scoping the invalidation problem, which is the real product risk. Caching is easy; correct invalidation is not. This package's model-event-based invalidation is where stale-data bugs live (pricing, inventory, permissions). It supports a decision to explicitly budget engineering time for invalidation semantics and cache-key design rather than treating caching as a checkbox.
• Roadmap sequencing for technical-debt and upgrade work. Last release was 2016-12-21 (Laravel 5.3/5.4 era). Any consideration here is really a decision about legacy surfaces — whether a Laravel 5.x service gets a quick read-path win or gets scheduled for a framework upgrade instead.
• Risk classification of a dependency. 23 stars, 0 dependents, no release in ~9 years: effectively zero community validation. That is a procurement/vendor-risk signal that should feed a "do not adopt in new code" standard.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it only when:

• You are on a genuinely legacy Laravel 5.x codebase, on a PHP version it was written against, and you need a low-effort read-path improvement on a handful of slow-changing models.
• The change is internal, low-blast-radius, and behind an existing feature flag — not customer-facing pricing, entitlement, or inventory data.
• You want a reference implementation to read before writing your own trait or adopting a maintained alternative; the pattern is instructive even if the code is not.
• You need a spike to quantify the performance upside of model caching (how much DB load a cache actually removes) before committing to a broader investment.

Look elsewhere when:

• You are on a currently supported Laravel version or PHP 8.x. No release since 2016 means no compatibility guarantees, no PHP 8 type-safety work, no security patches, and no fixes for model serialization or Cache store changes. Assume it does not work until proven otherwise.
• You need tagged caching, Redis Cluster, multi-store strategies, queue-aware invalidation, or multi-tenant cache-key isolation.
• Correctness is load-bearing — anything where serving stale data is a business incident rather than a cosmetic bug.
• You need observable behavior: hit/miss metrics, invalidation tracing, or tests you can rely on.
• You want vendor support or an SLA. With zero dependents and 23 stars, there is no maintainer bench and no community to absorb a breaking change.

Maintained alternatives to evaluate instead: Laravel's native Cache::remember plus model events, geneaLabs/laravel-model-caching (query-level caching with tag support), or spatie/laravel-responsecache if the actual goal is HTTP-level caching rather than model-level.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives (one paragraph): We evaluated simplesoftwareio/simple-cache, a small MIT-licensed Laravel trait that caches Eloquent model queries and clears them on save/delete. It addresses a real cost — repeated database reads on slow-changing data — but it is not a dependency we should take on: the last release was 2016, it has 23 stars and zero downstream dependents, and it targets a Laravel generation we have moved past. The capability it offers is roughly a day of engineering to replicate on top of Laravel's first-party cache. Recommendation: do not adopt as a dependency. Use Laravel's built-in caching for the same outcome, spend the saved effort on invalidation correctness and cache observability, and treat this package as a pattern reference only.

For engineering: The package's proposition — a trait that wraps model reads in Cache::remember and hooks saved/deleted for invalidation — is sound and matches the framework's own idiom, but the implementation is frozen at the Laravel 5.3/5.4 era with no PHP 8 or modern Laravel support, no maintenance, and no downstream users to surface breakage. The invalidation model is coarse (whole-model event-based) and will not cover bulk updates, update() on query builders, or direct DB writes — the classic stale-cache failure modes. If we want this, we implement it in-house against the native Cache facade with explicit cache keys, tag support where the store allows, and tests covering invalidation paths; or we adopt a maintained package only if we need query-level caching with tagging and multi-tenant isolation. Do not add this to composer.json.