Rich Client program interface

The Rich Client Platform is a Java/SWT thick client built on the Eclipse RCP framework. A number of Sterling™ Order Management System Software Packaged Composite Application (PCAs), such as Sterling Call Center and Sterling Store Engagement (Legacy) Operations, use this graphical interface.

Enabling content compression

The Rich Client Platform client supports content compression for both the request and the response to and from the application server. The compression will reduce the application bytes by around 85%.

You can enable compression in the locations.ycfg parameter file.

You may want to consider developing multiple locations.ycfg files with different settings. For example, you can define a locations.ycfg file for local users without content compression and a locations.ycfg file for remote users with compression enabled. This gives you the flexibility to deploy the appropriate locations.ycfg file to different user groups.

In the following example, the REMOTE location has compression enabled by setting the CompressionEnabled attribute to Y:


   <Locations>
     <Location id = "DEFAULT" proxyServer="yourproxyserver.com" 
       proxyPort="8080" updateType ="pull">
       <Config Name = "DEFAULT" Protocol = "https" BaseUrl = "localhost" 
         PortNumber = "7001" ApiUrl 
="/smcfs/RcpServlet" 
         CompressionEnabled = "N" 
       </Config>
     </Location>
     <Location id = "REMOTE" proxyServer="yourproxyserver.com"
       proxyPort="8080" updateType ="client">
       <Config Name = "DEFAULT" Protocol = "https" 
         BaseUrl = "localhost" PortNumber = "7001" 
         ApiUrl ="/smcfs/RcpServlet" 
         CompressionEnabled = "Y"
       </Config>
     </Location>
   </Locations>

Images

To improve the performance of the screens, the RCP client has the ability to retrieve and display images in a separate background thread. This can be beneficial when you are displaying large orders. For example, when you display the order detail screen in COM PCA and you display small images of the item at the order line level, the main thread will paint the order detail screen and its content. A separate thread will paint the icons.

To improve the performance further, the images are cached on your local drive after they have been retrieved. The cache could eliminate requests back to the application server for images. The cache is deleted when you restart the RCP client to ensure that you have the latest images.

For performance, you might want to consider the following:

You can specify an image server that is separate from the application server. For example, in the following example, the images come from http://yantraimg.acme.com. This will steer static image retrieval to specialized image servers:


   <Locations>
     ...
     <Location id = "REMOTE" proxyServer="yourproxyserver.com"
       proxyPort="8080" updateType ="client">
       <Config Name = "DEFAULT" Protocol = "https" 
         BaseUrl = "localhost" PortNumber = "7001" 
         ApiUrl ="/smcfs/RcpServlet" 
         CompressionEnabled = "Y"
       </Config>
       <Config Name = "IMAGE" Protocol = "http" 
         BaseUrl = "yantraimg.acme.com" PortNumber = "7001" 
         ApiUrl="/smcfs/icons/rcp/$param1$.gif" 
         CompressionEnabled = "N"
       <Config Name = "IMAGE_SMALL" Protocol = "http" 
         BaseUrl = "yantraimg.acme.com" PortNumber = "7001" 
         ApiUrl="/smcfs/icons/rcp/$param1$_small.gif" 
         DefaultApiUrl="/smcfs/icons/rcp/404.gif" 
         CompressionEnabled = "N"
       </Config>
       ...
     </Location>
   </Locations>

You can disable images for users on limited or slow networks by removing the IMAGE, IMAGE_SMALL and IMAGE_BIG Config elements from your locations.ycfg file.
You can specify the same icon for items or groups of items. Subsequent request for this icon will be served from cache.