Fragment caching in Spring MVC

Hi,

I've been working with Spring MVC (with Sitemesh) for a while now and I would like to start using a page fragment cache.

Most element of pages can be reused and only so much needs to be created on the fly.

The challenge I see here is that Spring is very top down page oriented. Everything flows from the controller and it doesn't make much sense caching a page fragment when all the database interaction, supported or not by a cache, happens anyway. And with tools such as Hibernate it can sometimes be quite hard to avoid a lot of unnecessary query overhead.

I am wondering what strategies could be employed and what experiences people have with this?

Some options I see:
* Create "mini-controllers" that create parts of the page and have them called from Sitemesh decorators for elements such as head and footer. (I believe Grails does something like this)
* Create mini-controllers that are called through Service Side Includes/Edge Side Includes from a front end webserver.

I have looked around a little but this topic seems to be very Grails heavy when you Google it.
I would very much like to keep things on the "Spring-side" because this gives much more control.

I am curious what strategies people use and if there are any pointers people could give me to implementing something like this or better yet, finding something already implemented.

Kind regards,
Marc