Dynamic Cache Policy Editor for WebSphere Application Server

Overview

Requirements

Download

FAQs

Forum

Reviews

What is Dynamic Cache Policy Editor for WebSphere Application Server?

This Eclipse plug-in is a tool for generating, creating, and editing cache policies for the dynamic cache service of WebSphere® Application Server. The dynamic cache is a service that runs on the IBM WebSphere Application Server. It improves the performance of Java^TM 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications by caching the response of servlets, Java Server Pages (JSPs), WebSphere Commands, and Web services. Caching these responses can allow future identical requests to obtain data from the cache, avoiding lengthy computations or queries to back-end systems.

With the dynamic cache service, application developers must define cache policies to specify how the dynamic cache behaves. The rules in a cache policy define what requests to cache, when to serve a cached response, and the conditions for freshness of objects in the cache. The cache policy is stored in an XML file called cachespec.xml, a text file that can become difficult to maintain and test.

The Dynamic Cache Policy Editor makes cache policies easier to create and maintain by providing an interface that plugs into WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) or Application Server Toolkit. The editor validates cache policies against its XML schema, provides assistance in completing content, and restricts changes that are invalid during run time. The plug-in also includes a simple tool that can analyze servlets and JSPs and then generate the cache policies and add them to the cache policy file.

How does it work?

Once installed, the plug-in adds a wizard to the File -> New menu option for creating a new cache policy file for a Web application. This wizard provides the option of creating an empty file or automatically generating and adding policies for all servlets and JSPs in the application. The plug-in adds a Generate Cache Policies option to the pop-up menu of Web applications and their resources. This option automatically creates policies for the selected resources and adds them to an existing policy file or creates a new one if there is no policy file present.

The editor associates itself with the cache policy file and becomes its default editor. The editor has the standard look and feel of editors provided in WSAD for J2EE deployment descriptors. It consists of multiple GUI pages and a source (text) page. Wizards are embedded within the editor pages; these wizards help the user to easily add complex content to the cache policy file. The source and GUI pages are synchronized and make use of Eclipse Edit menu items such as Undo and Copy. The source page provides content completion and content validation. Errors and warnings are listed in the Workbench Tasks view and are also marked in the source page.

This plug-in also contributes a customized content outliner page to the workbench outline view; this page provides a structured view of the editor's contents and assists the user in navigating through the contents of the editor when the cache policy file is being edited.