Overview of the Caching Proxy API
The Caching Proxy plug-in API is an interface to the Caching Proxy that enables you to extend the base functions of the proxy server.
Important: Caching Proxy is available on all Edge component
installations, with the following exceptions:
- Caching Proxy is not available for Edge component installations that run on Itanium 2 or AMD Opteron 64-bit processors.
- Caching Proxy is not available for Edge component installations of Load Balancer for IPv4 and IPv6.
You can write extensions, or plug-ins, to do customized processing,
including the following examples:
- Enhancing the basic authentication routine, or replacing it with a site-specific process.
- Adding error-handling routines to track problems or alert for serious conditions.
- Detecting and tracking information that comes in from the requesting client, such as server referrals and user agent codes.
The Caching Proxy API
provides the following benefits:
- Efficiency
- The API is designed specifically for the threaded processing system used by the Caching Proxy.
- Flexibility
- The API contains rich and versatile functions.
- The API is platform independent and language neutral. It runs on all Caching Proxy platforms, and plug-in applications can be written in most of the programming languages supported by these platforms.
- Ease of use
- Simple data types are passed by reference instead of by value (for example, long *, char *).
- Each function has a fixed number of parameters.
- Includes bindings for the C language.
- Plug-ins do not impact allocated memory; plug-in applications allocate and free memory independently of other Caching Proxy processes.