As you will see in the upcoming chapters, Infinispan is designed to operate in many different environments in a number of ways and provide a broad range of configuration parameters such as Cache Modes, Transactions, Listeners, Expiration, and many others. Fortunately, most have sensible default values, and so you can even run your applications using zero configuration, as we did in the previous section Anatomy of an Infinispan clustered cache.

Cache instances can be retrieved using an appropriate CacheManager, which represents a collection of caches. Thus, if you want to create a better and improved cache for Infinispan, you have to understand how this configuration works. There are two approaches you can use to configure Infinispan, An Infinispan cache may be configured declaratively using an XML configuration file, or programmatically via the fluent configuration API.

The configuration file conforms to the XML Schema, which you can find in the following directory...