When to Tell Your Kids About Presentation 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 majority of browsers; IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera. We’ll show real examples of where certain types of client caching can go terribly wrong and share success stories of the effects of successful caching.

To understand what is happening under the covers we’ll review the different aspects, from HTTP Headers to ETags, of the HTTP protocol available for leveraging client caching. This provides the base of knowledge to then look at what rails gives us for free and also to explain some of the hidden silent features of the platform. When looking at what we can do extra to improve client caching we’ll review different available plugins and their tradeoffs and why they don’t sometimes deliver what is promised.