On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 10:11:50AM +0200, Edi Weitz wrote:
I've built sites that use template engines that are backed by a "data miner" that refreshes the context used to fill templates on a periodic basis. Web-based reporting interfaces can take advantage of this scenario.
But why then don't you serve these pages statically directly from Apache?
In this specific example, the data model can be modified by other external events as well. Furthermore, there are numerous templates that provide visibility into the data model and each is customized to the user. I.e., the template contains the username, last login, etc. It isn't practical to store 'n' copies of output.
In addition, each page includes a Refresh header (for 5 minutes) as these reports are meant to be used by level 1 and level 2 support teams that leave them open indefinitely. Thus, when a change occurs to the data model, we can simply use getLastModified to invalidate all of the pages stored in cache on the client side.