Tomayko: 'Thing Caches do'

2008-11-17 @ 17:52#

this post by Ryan Tomayko is an excellent post that sums up 'gateway' caching for web servers. clear, straight-forward, and well illustrated. well, done!

The basic mechanisms shown here form the conceptual foundation of caching in HTTP — not to mention the Cache architectural constraint as defined by REST. There’s more to it, of course: a cache’s behavior can be further constrained with additional Cache-Control directives, and the Vary header narrows a response’s cache suitability based on headers of subsequent requests. For a more thorough look at HTTP caching, I suggest Mark Nottingham’s excellent Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters. Paul James’s HTTP Caching is also quite good and bit shorter. And, of course, the relevant sections of RFC 2616 are highly recommended.

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