GWT Mini Pattern: Cache ‘static’ data

Using the Java marshalling API makes remote calls from GWT to a Java server quick and easy. However, each of those calls introduces performance and complexity issues. Performance, because browsers tend to limit the number of remote network calls per server. From the HTTP 1.1 RFC: “A single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy.” This means that if you have more than two components making network calls, the calls will queue up (and that ignores image downloads and other network connections). The complexity arises from the non linear nature of asynchronous network calls. This can lead to a program structure that is not easily understood without careful reading (‘first, we find the user, then, after that we branch, and if we have a valid user, we find their saved bookmarks from the server…’).

If you have an amount of static content that doesn’t often change from user to user, use a RequestBuilder to retrieve the data from the server. Whatever software generates the data should set headers such that the page is cached for a fair while (either via the Cache Control header or the Expires header). The first time the request is made, the browser ends up making a network request–all the way to the server. After that, the browser will return the resource from its cache, using fewer network resources and returning the data more quickly. Using this approach also makes data available across components and pages. I almost always use JSON to represent such rarely changing data, because GWT can parse that easily, though you could use some other data format as well.

Using the browser as your caching system is not free: you pay for the creating of the network call (XMLHttpRequest, etc) and the reparse of the JSON. But you aren’t going over the network, and it’s relatively transparent to all the clients. The alternative, however, of creating your own caching system, is often more daunting–especially if you want to share data across page requests. I’m not aware of any caching systems (such as ehcache) that are GWT compatible at the moment (and they’d have their own costs in terms of javascript download size). Google Gears does provide something compatible, but is not transparent to the user (Gears requires installation).

[tags]caching, gwt, leverage the browser[/tags]