Features of Caching

Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 has the following web application response caching capabilities:

• Caching is configurable based on the servlet name or the URI.

• When caching is based on the URI, the URI can include user-specified parameters in the query string. For example, a response from /garden/catalog?category=roses is different from a response from /garden/catalog?category=lilies. These responses are stored under different keys in the cache.

• Cache size, entry timeout, and other caching behaviors are configurable.

• Entry timeout is measured from the time an entry is created or refreshed. You can override this timeout for an individual cache mapping by specifying the cache-mapping element timeout.

• You can determine caching criteria programmatically by writing a cache helper class. For example, if a servlet only stores the time when a back-end data source was last modified, you can write a helper class to retrieve the last-modified timestamp from the data source and decide whether to cache the response based on that timestamp. See CacheHelper Interface.

• You can determine cache key generation programmatically by writing a cache key generator class. See CacheKeyGenerator Interface.

• All non-ASCII request parameter values specified in cache key elements must be URL encoded. The caching subsystem attempts to match the raw parameter values in the request query string.

• The newly updated classes affect data what gets cached. The web container clears the cache during dynamic deployment or reloading of classes.

• The following HttpServletRequest request attributes are:

  • com.sun.appserv.web.cachedServletName, the cached servlet target

  • com.sun.appserv.web.cachedURLPattern, the URL pattern being cached