Second round of Web Http Caching

As I discussed in my previous post, web caching relies on specific headers that you need to use correctly on your services. That’s an http application protocol thing, and something that you can easily use in any application framework that treats Http as first citizen. This means that you don’t need to implement anything fancy or exclusively rely on an specific caching technology or components for doing ouput caching (e.g ASP.NET Cache).

You only need to worry about using the Expires and Cache-Control headers correctly and optionally setting up a validation process with conditional gets. If the application framework automatically provides this for you under the hood, that’s definitely a good thing too.

I promised to write a more detailed post with some extensions for WCF, but Jose beat me to it. He wrote an excellent post on how to implement some generic extensions for WCF Web Apis, and what’s more important, how to configure intermediaries like local caches in the browser or reverse proxies (Squid) to cache the data for us.