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  1.  Home
  2. WDSCI-L
  3. February 2007

many problems seem to be caused by "the cache"

Often, I see that various problems are reported where source code on the PC does not match what is on the server, or the debugger does not appear to be working correctly, etc., and over and over again, I see the response or answer is to "clear the cache." And now, I see in some recent posts that there is apparently more than one of these "caches" within WDSCi and RSE (and I presume, within Eclipse itself).
I think this idea of users having to "clear the cache" goes back to some of the earliest web browsers, when most people had access to the internet via an ISP at dial-up speeds. Even then, I felt that placing the burden on the end-user to know when to clear the cache was the wrong approach. But now, it seems that almost all web browsers carry forward this "tradition."
IMHO, this goes against the most fundamental principles of a "cache" -- a (local) cache is there to improve performance by enabling use of a local copy of some files or resources, and this mechanism is supposed to be "transparent" to the users -- the end user should never need to be aware of the existence of the cache(s), much less, to have to be SO aware of this as to recognize when it is necessary to "clear" the cache(s) manually!
I realize that WDSCi is built on top of RAD which is itself built on Eclipse, so some of these issues may run deeper than just making a few changes to WDSC.
Perhaps a short-term interim solution could be to provide a check-box preference option to automatically clear all of the various caches each and every time the user closes down and/or restarts the workbench?
Ultimately, the cache(s) should be implemented to behave as a "proper" cache that automatically refreshes its contents as needed, to stay "in sync" with the original (host) files or resources. Any caches should be completely transparent to workbench users, other than the perception that the workbench is able to perform much faster (which is the whole point). Users should not need to know how many caches there are, or how to clear them -- these are "implementation details" of the "internals" of the Eclipse Workbench and/or RAD or WDSC, that should not be "visible" to the user at all (other than perhaps an option to enable or disable use of the feature entirely). 

That's my opinion, what's yours?

Mark S. Waterbury

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