I’ve been thinking for several years about the flaws in the Internet’s (nearly non-existant) caching model, and have reached several conclusions. First, caching policy is very difficult, basically impossible, to specify in some arbitrary protocol. This is one of the biggest problems we’ve got with caching – the cache manager has a lot of settings he can adjust, but the data provider has almost none – basically cache or don’t cache (oh yeah, he can specify a timeout, too). So, I’m led to conclude that data providers need a very flexible way to inform caches of their data’s caching policy, like a remote executable format, i.e. Java. My second conclusion is that what limited caching we’ve got is destroyed when people want to provide dynamic content. The only way I can see to cache dynamic content is to cache not the data, but the program used to create the data, and expect the client to run the program in order to display the data. And we don’t want to do that on the caches (if we can help it) for performance reasons. Again, a remote executable format, this time on the client, i.e. Java. My third major conclusion is that caching is a multicast operation and requires multicast support to be done, but that’s for a diferent paper. Thus, I’m proposing an integrated Java-based caching architecture using what I call “cachelets” on the caches to provide a flexible and usable caching architecture.
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