WebSphere Edge Components Caching Proxy

The WebSphere® Edge Component Caching Proxy (CPS) reduces bandwidth usage and improves a Web site's speed and reliability by providing a point-of-presence node for one or more backend content servers. The CPS can cache and serve both static content and content dynamically generated by the WebSphere Application Server.

The proxy server intercepts data requests from a client, retrieves the requested information from content-hosting machines, and delivers that content back to the client. Most commonly, the requests are for documents stored on Web server machines (also called origin servers or content hosts) and delivered using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). However, you can configure the proxy server to handle other protocols, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Gopher.

The proxy server stores cache-able content in a local cache before delivering it to the requester. Examples of cache-able content include static Web pages and JavaServer Pages files that contain dynamically generated, but infrequently changing, information. Caching enables the proxy server to satisfy subsequent requests for the same content by delivering it directly from the local cache, which is much quicker than retrieving it again from the content host.

There are several plugins for the Caching Proxy and for additional functionality to the proxy server, but only the default setup was used.