portlet ehcache

[micheal.marky@gmail.com]

Hi , I need a suggestion/solution from the experts here.
There are 5 portlets in my application and all of them make web service calls (different services) to get the data and displayon the portlets.
I need to implement Caching using the ehcache such that the request originating from the user is served from the cache if the data is available in the cache or else make a web service call to serve the request and also update the cache.

The question is how do i implement this. Do I need to create a separate ehcache.xml per protlet and implement the caching or shall i create a common jar project and configure all the caching properties in one ehcache.xml and include the jar file in all the 5 portlets (in each portlets war file, lib folder)

Please help, also is there a better solution to achieve this.

Thanks
Micheal Marky