Complex Web Context

Caching is the process of depositing copies of accessed resources in a temporary storage location, for facilitating a quicker future access. Caching techniques are applied both in stand-alone or in web distributed applications, but the storing procedures differ in concept and implementation. In Internet technologies, the browsers are caching by default copies of loaded resources (files or data) for speeding up the future loading times produced by the pages that rely on the already retrieved information. The implicit caching mechanism covers the resources that are constant in time (multimedia, styling, or scripting files) and have no effect on the web content generated dynamically on the server side of the application. In this latter category can be found menus, generated charts data, table values and the list can continue. In complex web applications, the volume of dynamic data is large and significantly bigger than the size of constant resources. This makes the implicit browser caching mechanisms almost ineffective. In addition, in many cases the server puts a lot of effort into computing the dynamic resources (complex database interrogations, data processing, etc.). A programmatic solution was implemented on the server side of the application for easing, whenever possible, the dynamic data computing and delivery. Each dynamic content depends on the embedding specific context, which is completely deterministic (the same context produces the same generated content). Each web page context is defined by a series of parameters that once established can act as a composite indicator key that can be associated with the corresponding dynamic resources.