Webmasters Gallery

Recently, I have been doing research on Web Caching. And I have found Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters , which is a detailed, informational document published by Mark Nottingham.

A Web cache sits between one or more Web servers and a client or many clients, and watches requests come by, saving copies of the responses — like HTML pages, images and files — for itself. Then, if there is another request for the same URL, it can use the response that it has, instead of asking the origin server for it again.

Web Caching can reduce latency, because the request is satisfied from the cache instead of the origin server, it takes less time for it to get the representation and display it. This makes the Web seem more responsive.

And also, Web Caching can reduce network traffic, because representations are reused, it reduces the amount of bandwidth used by a client. This saves money if the client is paying for traffic, and keeps their bandwidth requirements lower and more manageable.

You can also get more information about the type of web caches, how web caches work, how to control them, tips for building a cache-aware site and etc…

Unfortunately, I am not able to make it to SXSW this year, but to pay homage to Austin’s greatest music/film/interactive festival, this evening I created a site you can send to your friends who may seem a little down about missing the big show. For those who are lucky enough to be able to make it down, congratulations. For those of us who work for companies that think it’s one giant party instead of an educational and informational conference, we’re stuck in our tiny cubicles.

The site is VirtualSXSW.com and allows you to track the latest action from SXSW on Twitter. I might add some more cool stuff to the site… or I might not, it all depends on how much time I have to goof around with it.

Over at the Mozilla Developer Tools Lab, we’re starting work on a new tool to help web developers understand what’s going on with the memory management of their application:

So how does a developer troubleshoot memory problems? There’s only one way good way to do it: use the operating system’s tools. Unfortunately, this option doesn’t provide the right level of detail; you can either see how much memory the browser is consuming in aggregate (which is fine to let you know that your memory use is increasing, but doesn’t tell you why) or you can see which data structures in the browser itself are consuming the memory (which is fine if you understand the guts of the browser, but it’s pretty hard for anyone else to understand how this maps into the web application they’ve developed).

What’s missing is a tool targeted at web developers that makes it easy to understand what’s happening with their application’s memory usage. We propose to create such a tool.

Check out the full entry over at my blog for more on the motivations inspiring us to tackling this problem and for details on the first phase of this approach. Let us know what you think!