What is Dispatcher?

Dispatcher is just a web server plugin - written by Adobe.

An HTTP web server provides more robust features - primarily stores, processes and delivers web pages to clients.

Mainly Dispatcher is used for

• Caching
• URL Re-writing
• Load Balancing

Caching:

The Dispatcher stores the cached files on the web server as if they were part of a static website. If a user requests a cacheable document the Dispatcher checks whether that document exists in the web server's file system .,  if it is not cached, then the Dispatcher requests the document from the AEM Publisher instance.

URL Re-writing:

URL Re-writing, it means that whatever the full url path we see in Author/publisher will be shortend and the rules will be written on the dispatcher.

Ex: https://author.com/content/mywebsite/en/home.html , after re-writing the rule this can be converted to https://liveurl.com/home.html.

Load Balancing:

Whenever a url is accesed via the browser then the request first goes to dispatcher and from dispacther the request goes to Publisher and it looks for the specific path on the publisher and if its present then the requested page will be shown else, 404 page not found is shown. Also if multiple publishers are configured on the dispacther then dispacther decides to which publisher the request have to go.

For more information on AEM , go through the below syllabus.

AEM Author Concepts