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Language-Based Caching of Dynamically Generated HTML
Claus Brabrand
May 2001 |
Abstract:
Increasingly, HTML documents are dynamically generated by
interactive Web services. To ensure that the client is presented with the
newest versions of such documents it is customary to disable client caching
causing a seemingly inevitable performance penalty. In the <bigwig>
system, dynamic HTML documents are composed of higher-order templates that
are plugged together to construct complete documents. We show how to exploit
this feature to provide an automatic fine-grained caching of document
templates, based on the service source code. A <bigwig> service
transmits not the full HTML document but instead a compact JavaScript recipe
for a client-side construction of the document based on a static collection
of fragments that can be cached by the browser in the usual manner. We
compare our approach with related techniques and demonstrate on a number of
realistic benchmarks that the size of the transmitted data and the latency
may be reduced significantly.
Available as PostScript, PDF. |