Re: RFC HTTP::Cache module

That sounds like a great idea.  Its still a useful module, afterall.

Sorry I didn't have time to respond to your last email.  In general, the 
points were valid.

-ofer

Mattias Holmlund wrote:

> 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 mån, 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
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >    
>
>