When to Tell Your Kids About Client Caching

To successfully build a scalable web application we need to leverage caching as early in the request as possible. This presentation will explore how client caching works and sometimes does not work on the popular browsers. We’ll show real examples of where certain types of client caching can go terribly wrong and share success stories of the benefits when executed correctly.

To understand what is happening under the covers we’ll review the different aspects, from HTTP Headers to ETags, of the HTTP protocol that can be leveraged. This provides the base of knowledge so that we can look at what rails gives us for free and also to explain some of the hidden features of the platform. We will also review the available plugins that can assist an application in reducing network traffic and why they might not always deliver what is promised.