Re: many problems seem to be caused by "the cache"

Dunno, mate

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark S. Waterbury" <mark.s.waterbury@xxxxxxx>
To: "Websphere Development Studio Client for iSeries" <wdsci-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 4:46 PM
Subject: [WDSCI-L] 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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15:24