Authors: J. Fritz Barnes and Raju Pandey
Web caching has emerged as one solution for improving client latency on the web. Cache effectiveness depends on the policies used to route requests to other caches and servers, maintain up-to-date web objects (HTML files, images, etc.) and remove objects from the cache. Traditional caches apply the same policies to all web objects; however caches lack the ability to apply specialized policies to a subset of cached objects. We present an extensible caching infrastructure in which cache administrators, servers, and end users can customize how web objects are cached, replaced, and kept consistent. This paper presents a domain-specific programming language, CacheL, for defining customizable caching policies. The resulting infrastructure will lead to the development of a more efficient and customizable web caching solution.
Full Paper: postscript