What is a pull-through cache?

I found a reference to this concept in the EHCache documentation, but I could not find any proper explanation of wh开发者_如何学Cat it means. It tried Googling around but to no avail.

The more common term is self populating cache.

In Ehcache docs a SelfPopulatingCache (= pull-through cache) is described as a:

A selfpopulating decorator for Ehcache that creates entries on demand.

That means when asking the SelfPopulatingCache for a value and that value is not in the cache, it will create this value for you.