[TYPO3-dev] Announce: Released enetcache to TER

[Christian Kuhn]

Hey all,


we are glad to announce the first release of ext:enetcache to TER.

What does it do?
This extension provides an API for frontend plugins to realize caching 
on a plugin element level. It's based on the new caching framework 
included in TYPO3 4.3. This extension fills a gap between USER and 
USER_INT plugins by enabling plugins to cache their own content for a 
given lifetime and using this cache entry to save the computing 
resources if other parts of the page have to be re-rendered.

Features
- API for frontend plugins to easily get, set and drop entries in the 
cache engine. The usual TYPO3 page cache is handled transparently by 
enetcache.
- Flexible lifetime handling of cache entries.
- Cached plugin content can be re-used on different pages.
- Automagic clearing of dirty cache entries if records have been changed 
in the backend.
- Hooks into “Clear all cache” to enable administrators to manually 
clear content element caches together with the regular page cache.
- Provides a scheduler task to do a garbage collection of old entries 
for cache backends that don't do that automatically (like dbBackend).
- Hooks in it's main frontend class allow other extensions to manipulate 
the cache handling. This is used by ext:enetcacheanalytics which comes 
with a fine grained backend module for debugging and tracking cache actions.
- Provides transparent cache wrappers for some widely used extensions. 
Currently wec_map and vge_tagcloud are supported.
- Provides a new database cache backend which stores compressed html 
content to save space and to speed up big cache tables.

enetcache is already used in production for at least two big sites. Some 
numbers: One of our sites has about 30 plugins on one page, 1/3 of them 
have a lifetime of just some minutes, while the rest is valid for a day 
or longer. Re-rendering the whole page (because some cache entries 
expired or records changed) without enetcache takes about 3 seconds, 
while using enetcache this usually goes down to 6-700ms. Some cache 
records can be re-used on other pages again, which reduces the render 
time there as well.

We are looking forward to your feedback, please check out the manual, 
it's already in a pretty good state.

You could also help by submitting more extensionwrappers that could be 
delivered together with wec_map and vge_tagcloud.


Cheers
Christian