[Zope-CMF] Re: CachingPolicyManager improvements

[Geoff Davis]

On Mon, 05 Sep 2005 18:15:41 +0200, Florent Guillaume wrote:

>>> If an FSPageTemplate is associated with a Caching Policy and that Caching
>>> Policy has 304s explicitly enabled, a series of checks take place.  If
>>> there is an If-Modified-Since header, the server checks the modification
>>> time associated with the template via the Caching Policy.  If there is an
>>> If-None-Match header and the Caching Policy defines an ETag function, the
>>> ETag is checked.  If all the checks pass, the server returns a 304 status
>>> and stops without rendering the page.  The server does less computation,
>>> and less data goes over the wire, so it's a double win.
>> 
>> 
>> If I'm not mistaken, this will only be useful for ZPTs that provide 
>> unchanged content over time ? Like css or scripts or invariant 
>> resources, i.e. not useful for the usual case of views ?

If you write your ETags in an appropriate way, this works beautifully for
views.  Consider an ETag that consists of a string containing (1) the
content object's modification date, (2) the user name for the currently
authenticated user, and (3) the current time rounded to the nearest
hour. If a user gets this content while logged in, the ETag will match
(1) when s/he is logged in, (2) if the content has not changed, and (3) if
the cached copy is less than an hour old.  You get cached, personalized
content that is guaranteed not to be stale and has an expiration time
that you control.  Very good stuff.