What's New in OracleAS Web Cache?

This section describes the new features of OracleAS Web Cache and provides pointers to additional information. This information is mostly useful to users who have managed previous releases of Oracle Application Server, including 10g (9.0.4) and 10g Release 2 (10.1.2.0.0).

The following sections describe the new features in OracleAS Web Cache:

• New Features in 10g Release 2 (10.1.2.0.2)

• New Features in 10g Release 2 (10.1.2.0.0)

New Features in 10g Release 2 (10.1.2.0.2)

The new administrative features of OracleAS Web Cache 10g Release 2 (10.1.2) include:

Enhanced Support for Configuring OracleAS Web Cache Solely as a Software Load Balancer or Reverse Proxy

In previous releases, you could configure OracleAS Web Cache solely as a software load balancer or reverse proxy in place of hardware load balancers.

In this release, support for this mode has been enhanced. You can now configure OracleAS Web Cache as software load balancer or reverse proxy even in front of an application using Edge Side Includes (ESI) or in front of another OracleAS Web Cache forming a cache hierarchy. A typical OracleAS Portal deployment, for example, has a built-in OracleAS Web Cache used for ESI assembly.

If you require other OracleAS Web Cache features, such as caching or compression support, do not configure this mode. Instead, configure a hardware load balancer or operating system load balancing support, and use OracleAS Web Cache's load balancing feature to manage requests to origin servers.

New Port Numbers for Some Components

To guard against conflicts with Windows ephemeral port number assignments, default port numbers and ranges have been changed for the OracleAS Web Cache operations ports.

New Features in 10g Release 2 (10.1.2.0.0)

The new features for OracleAS Web Cache in 10g Release 2 (10.1.2.0.0) include:

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Application Server Control Support

In previous releases, you had to use OracleAS Web Cache Manager to configure OracleAS Web Cache. In this release, you have two choices:

• You can use Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Application Server Control Console to configure OracleAS Web Cache along with other Oracle Application Server components.

• You can continue to use standalone tool OracleAS Web Cache Manager.

  For standalone OracleAS Web Cache installations or installations in which OracleAS Web Cache was not installed as part of Oracle Application Server, OracleAS Web Cache Manager is the only tool provided.

URL Path Prefix in Site Definitions

When configuring a site definition, you can specify a URL path prefix for those sites that share the same host name. For example, to treat http://www.company.com/employee and http://www.company.com/customer as two distinct sites, you specify /employee and /customer as prefixes.

Caching Rule Enhancements

• Simplified Configuration for Excluding the Value of Embedded URL Or POST Body Parameters

  In previous releases, to ignore the value of embedded URL or POST body parameters, you had to configure a session definition for the parameter, and then configure a session caching policy. In this release, you only need to configure the name of the parameter to ignore.

  It is still possible to exclude parameters by configuring a session definition with an accompanying session caching policy. If you have a configuration that specifies the same parameter for both exclusion parameter and a session definition with an accompanying session caching policy, the session method takes precedence. To avoid conflicts, Oracle recommends migrating to the new configuration methods to exclude parameters.

• Enabling and Disabling Caching Rules

  You can select to enable or disable caching rules. This feature is intended to provide convenience, so that you do need to create, remove, and then re-create ruled during staging and performance diagnosis.

  
  

  See Also: "Excluding the Value of Embedded URL or POST Body Parameters" for further information about excluding parameters "Configuring Caching Rules and Rule Association" for further information about enabling and disabling caching rules

  
  

Improved Diagnostics

• Tracking Oracle-ECID Information in the Response

  In 10g (9.0.4), OracleAS Web Cache provided the ability to log the request ID and sequence number from the Oracle-ECID request header in the event and access logs. The Oracle-ECID request header is used to track requests as they move through the Oracle Application Server architecture. OracleAS Web Cache expands support in 10g Release 2 (10.1.2) to include Oracle-ECID information whenever you configure to display diagnostic information in the Server response-header field or the HTML response body

• Additional Access Logging Formats for Tracking Oracle-ECID Information

  In 10g (9.0.4), OracleAS Web Cache provided the End-User Performance Monitoring Format that included the x-ecid field for tracking the Oracle-ECID information. In 10g Release 2 (10.1.2), Oracle-ECID information tracking is being expanded to include two new logging formats, Enhanced CLF (ECLF) and Enhanced Combined Log Format.

• Improved Popular Cache Requests Reporting

  The non-cacheable misses reported in the Popular Requests report have been expanded to include methods other than GET or POST request methods, HTTP status codes of non-200, requests not matching any rule with a query string, or the POST body is too large.