Http-authenticated Rails page caching
posted: March 31st, 2008 · by: Sven
So, Rails has added some great HTTP related features with HTTP authentication, ETagging and, of course, support for REST. These actually greatly help scaling our applications by moving to HTTP what really belongs there.
One similar feature that has been in Rails for ages is page caching which just saves the response to a file and lets the frontend server handle subsequent requests. For example Mephisto is known to be “fast as hell” just because it uses page caching for public, non-authenticated pages.
Unfortunately Rails page caching doesn’t work with authentication: if you have to authenticate your users you simply can’t use it.
For applications that target human users HTTP authentication might be of limited use anyways in many cases because it still opens up that ugly browser authentication dialog box that only die-hard HTTP geeks really like. On the other hand, when it comes to closing down an admin section for a blog, maybe that dialog is still a valid option for certain applications?
Also, these days it seems to be possible to get around that UI non-design with Ajax … so we might even be able to overcome this limitation. (Or maybe it it’s not, like Mislav told me at Euruko. I’d still have to actually try that stuff out. But anyways :)
But even if not, the ability to HTTP authenticate cached pages should be great news at least when it comes to web services that need some authentication but often times don’t need any “personalization” based on user preferences or whatever.
After some recent experiments I really think this kind of stuff is actually possible. And not only that, it’s even very simple to implement it in Mongrel and Rails as a proof of concept (which might not be sufficient for production, but see below).
Read the rest of this entryJavascript/CSS asset bundling a prominent feature in Rails 2.0
posted: September 12th, 2007 · by: Sven
Hey, I just noticed that bundled Javascript and CSS assets will be supported natively in Rails 2.0! David even selected this feature as one of those prominent Rails 2.0 features that he presented during his keynote at the RailsConf Chicago 2007 on May 18th.
Read the rest of this entryServer config: Mistakes with character encoding - part 2
posted: March 10th, 2007 · by: Sven
So, you know how to pipe data from the webbrowser through various library layers to a database and all the way back again. You know how to configure every layer of all those sophisticated web applications, frameworks, libraries, programming languages, ...
But now here’s this dammned static file that seems to get totally screwed somewhere and you’re already starting to pull your hair out because there’s no apparent reason.
Relax and step back. Look again. Sometimes things are simple, that simple that one doesn’t see the wood for the trees.
Read the rest of this entryCommon mistakes with character encodings - part 1
posted: February 14th, 2007 · by: Sven
Ok, I’m going to collect some gotchas, pitfalls, mistakes and traps relating to Unicode, UTF-8, character encoding in general etc. Hopefully this prevents myself and others from being bitten (again) or at least might help to find the culprid more easily.
So if you have any additions here: please let me know! You read that? If you’ve encountered some kind of common problem with character encodings, please, let me know! There’s a comment form to use below and you also can always send me a mail. Thanks in advance :)
Let’s start with some basic stuff …
Read the rest of this entryThinking about RESTful dynamic web applications
posted: April 29th, 2006 · by: Sven
I signed up to the REST Discussion Mailing List a while ago and greatly enjoyed to lurk the really interesting and instructive discussions over there - I learned a big deal from it about my own projects (both past and future ones) from following that.
And yes, it really makes sense to me to better respect HTTP and build more RESTful applications - at the very least when it comes to higher scalability through better caching.
But … having most oftenly been involved in projects where there are highly dynamic and customized pages (think: www.yahoo.com or worse) this seems to be more or less an unsolved problem within REST.
One approach that I came up with (well, at least: conceptually) has been mentioned by Bill Venners.
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