Access JBoss Cache from different web applications?

[drcallaway]

I have two separate web applications that both need access to the same JBoss Cache. That is, one WAR may store information in the cache that needs to be accessed by another WAR. Here's what I've tried so far:

1. I tried storing the cache object in the JNDI tree but this doesn't work since it is not serializable.
2. I tried including it as a transient member of a serializable wrapper class but I would always get a ClassCastException when trying to cast the object back to its original type (presumably because the different web applications are using different class loaders).
3. I tried registering it as an MBean in one web application but haven't been able to figure out how to access the MBean and the underlying cache from the other WAR.

Any ideas?

[snacker]

We had a similar problem, but not specifically dealing with the cache.
We chose the second option mentioned here http://www.jboss.org/community/wiki/useJBossWebClassLoaderinJBoss5

Also, you might want to make sure you don't have duplicate classes in different jars/wars/ears.

I haven't tried to access the cache via the MBean service, but it shouldn't be too difficult using the standard jmx api's: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/javax/management/package-summary.html

I think you can also get the jmx interfaces via the InitialiContext::lookup(...) route.

From what I remember, though the older versions of the cache mbeans were more useful than what are there now.

[snacker]

Have you tried using CacheManagerImpl?
http://www.jboss.org/file-access/default/members/jbosscache/freezone/docs/3.1.0.CR1/apidocs/org/jboss/cache/CacheManagerImpl.html

There is a getCache( String, boolean ) which might be useful.