The dispatcher is an important piece of a secure, stable, and solidly-performing AEM implementation. According to the documentation it can provide caching, load balancing, as well as help to protect your publish instances from attack. For such a multifaceted tool it seems to receive very little attention during the dev process, typically called to action in the final stages of a deployment when most of the dev work has already been done. I propose that developers (including myself) could write better code if they had a deeper understanding of this tool, which is why I went through the process of setting one up on my Mac. What follows are my notes.

My slides from CQCON 2013 are available here: cqcon-mobile-first