> I would like to propose a new Apache module before I send it off to > CPAN. The name chosen is Apache::CacheContent.
This is very cool. I was planning to write one of these, and now I don't have to. Your implementation is short and interesting. I was planning to do it with a PerlFixupHandler and an Apache::Filter module to capture the output. While that approach wouldn't require the use of method handlers, I think yours may be easier for newbies because it doesn't require them to understand as many modules. The only real advantage of using Apache::Filter is that it would work well with existing Registry scripts. A couple of other C's for your R: A cache defines parameters that constitute a unique request. Your cache currently only handles the filename from the request as a parameter. It would be nice to also handle query args, POST data, and arbitrary headers like cookies or language choices. You could even support an optional request_keys method for handlers which would let people generate their own unique key based on their analysis of the request. Doing this would mean you would need to generate filenames based on the unique keys (probably by hashing, as in Cache::FileCache) and do an internal redirect to that file if available when someone sends a request that matches. Another thing that might be nice would be to store the TTL with the file rather than making the handler give it to you again each time. This is done in mod_proxy by putting an Expires header in the file and reading it before sending the file, but you could also store them in a dbm or something. Support for sending Expires headers automatically would also be useful. When I first thought about this problem, I wanted to do it the way Vignette StoryServer does: by having people link to the cached files directly and making the content generating code be the 404 handler for those files. That gives the best possible performance for cached files, since no PerlFixupHandler needs to run. The downside is that then you need an external process to go through and clean up expired files. It's also hard to handle complex cache criteria like query args. StoryServer does it by having really crazy generated file names and processing all the links to files on the way out so that they use the cached file names. Pretty ugly. I know you guys are pushing to get the book done, so don't feel pressured to address this stuff now. I think the current module looks more than good enough for an initial CPAN release. - Perrin
