Evaluation criteria of WebSphere DynaCache

Caching is a tried and true method for dramatically speeding up applications. Applications often use temporary data, which are expensive to create, but have a lifetime over which they can be reused. For example, a servlet might create a web page from data obtained from multiple databases, network connections, and expensive computations; the sets of data might be reusable over the same or different periods of time. While the solutions for caching content have resulted in excellent performance for some applications, they have little or no value in enhancing the performance of applications with dynamically generated data that do not have any re usability.

Dyna Cache(DC) is out of box capability offered by IBM WebSphere Application Server. Dyna Cache is a sophisticated java hash table, which caches to store the objects and later retrieved based on matching data rules. Below table contains list of criteria against which WebSphere Dyna Cache can be evaluated.

Evaluation Criteria of WebSphere Dyna Cache :

Feature/Requirement	Supports/Do Not Support	Remarks
Re usability	Supports	-
Ease of Use	It is easy to use as well as administer.	By turning on WebSphere caching service, Dyna Cache is enabled for an application. In addition to that, one needs to define cachespec.xml, in which caching mechanism is defined. This makes the caching entirely configurable, with out effecting application code. Websphere also provides a dynamic cache monitor to monitor the results of cache configuration.
Configuration and monitoring	Supports configurations and monitoring mechanisms to an application.
Basic Features	Supports	-
Caching of Webservice/database data	Supports	-
Caching of JNDI look-up objects	-	Caching of JNDI look-up is done pro grammatically.
Client-side and Server-side Caching	Supports	-
Integration of other foundation framework services	Supports	Provides DistributedMap and DistributedObjectCache interfaces that can be used to cache programmatically in J2EE applications for the additional caching requirements that are identified during the application design.
Use in Batch applications and stand-alone desktop applications	-	Can be done using “Intrusive Caching”
Integration with application run-time	Integrates seamlessly	-
Integration to development IDE	Supports	In the Development Server, the Caching service of the server needs to turn on.
Availability in different environments	Available	In different environments, the service need to turned on
Cache Security	-	There is no access control on Dyna Cache. Any application running in an application server can access any cache that a given application server has access to. More precisely, any application can look up any cache in JNDI if the cache is accessible from that server and then see (or modify) all of its contents. Looking up a cache in a remote server will not work, so applications can only see caches that are being replicated to their server.
Administering Cache during run-time	Available	Cache Monitor
Cache Disk Off-Load	Supports	-