Based on the feedback i have gotten from Ofer Nave and Nigel Horne, I
have realized that HTTP::Cache might be a too generic name for my
module, since it only handles simple get-requests. I will therefore
change the name of my module. If noone objects, I will upload my module
to CPAN as HTTP::SimpleCache on Thursday.
I think there is room for a more generic module for caching
HTTP-requests and responses. One could probably write such a module by
inheriting from LWP::UserAgent and making a new implementation of
simple_request. This would mean that the rest of LWP could be used as
normal with special headers, cookies, robots.txt processing etc.
However, I personally have very little interest in such a module right
now, and I don't think it's a good idea to write a module that I have no
intention of using. I will therefore leave it up to someone else and
publish my module as is (with the UserAgent suggestion from Ofer).
/Mattias
On m�n, 2004-09-27 at 18:25, Mattias Holmlund wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have written a perl module that I want to publish on CPAN. The module
> implements a cache for http requests. It provides a single method get
> that fetches a url via http. The result of each get is stored in a
> cache on disk, and if the same url has been requested before, the
> proper ETag and If-Modified-Since headers are sent to the http server.
> The server can then respond that the object in the cache is up-to-date
> and HTTP::Cache will return a cached version of the data instead of
> fetching it from the server. This speeds up the HTTP get and saves
> bandwidth for both the server and the client.
>
> The module is very simple to use. Simply create a HTTP::Cache object
> and call the get-method on the returned object to fetch a url. You do
> not have to care if the data is fetched from the server or from the
> cache (but you can find out if you want to know).
>
>
> Sample usage:
>
> my $c = HTTP::Cache->new( {
> BasePath => "/tmp/cache", # Directory to store the cache in.
> MaxAge => 8*24, # How many hours should items be
> # kept in the cache after they
> # were last accessed?
> # Default is 8*24.
> Verbose => 1, # Print messages to STDERR.
> # Default is 0.
> UserAgent => "my-spider", # The user-agent string to use.
> # Default is "perl-http-cache".
> } );
>
> my( $content, $error ) = $c->get( $url );
>
> if( defined( $content ) )
> {
> # Data retrieved and stored in $content.
> # $error indicates if the data was found in the cache (0)
> # if it was fetched from the server but equal to the cache (1)
> # or if it was fetched from the server and different from the
> # cache (2).
> }
> else
> {
> print STDERR "Failed to fetch $url. " .
> "Error returned by server: $error";
> }
>
> Does anyone object to putting this module on CPAN or is it redundant?
> Is HTTP::Cache a good name for it?
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Mattias Holmlund
>
>
>
>
>
