Meaning of term transparency in software engineering

Question

Quite often I see myself confused when talking about code transparency. What I'm trying to clarify myself are constructs such as:

• This should be transparent to the user
• Caching should be transparent to the application

Would be great if someone could clarify, with some small pseudo code snippet, what's the actual meaning of such a thing?

Thanks

Answer 1

This generally means that it is invisible to the user. The user can use the application, and not know that a feature exists.

So, for caching to be "transparent", the application should not know that a caching layer exists. This is most easily exemplified by the opposite, in that a non-transparent caching layer would require the application invoke methods to check/expire caches.