Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput – Remote data accessing – Accessing a remote server
Reexamination Certificate
1999-01-25
2002-02-26
Lim, Krisna (Department: 2153)
Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput
Remote data accessing
Accessing a remote server
C709S202000, C709S213000, C711S118000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06351767
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates generally to data caching of web content on a network and, more specifically, to the caching of dynamic content in web pages in a web server.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) provide intra-enterprise connectivity, inter-enterprise connectivity and application hosting on a larger scale than ever before. By exploiting the broadly available and deployed standards of the Internet and the WWW, system users and designers can leverage a single architecture to build client/server applications for internal use that can reach outside to customers, business partners and suppliers.
FIG. 1
shows a commonly used network arrangement in which a plurality of local computer systems
200
in a local area network (LAN) may access a plurality of remote servers
100
through the Internet. Each remote server may be a web server (such as a Domino™ web server, available from Lotus Development Corporation of Cambridge, Mass.) for providing a web site for access by local computer systems
200
. Each web site normally further provides a plurality of web pages to be served to the local computer systems upon request. Each local computer system may access the remote web sites with web browser software.
The WWW is a collection of servers on an IP (Internet Protocol) network, such as the Internet, an Intranet or an Extranet, that utilize the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Hereinafter, “Internet” will be used to refer to any IP network. HTTP is a known application protocol that provides users with access to files, which can be in different formats, such as text, graphics, images, sound, and video, using a standard page description language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Among a number of basic document formatting functions, HTML allows software developers to specify graphical pointers on displayed web pages, commonly referred to as “hyperlinks,” that point to other web pages resident on remote servers. Hyperlinks commonly are displayed as highlighted text or other graphical image on the web page. Selection of a hyperlink with a pointing device, such as a computer mouse, causes the local computer to download the HTML associated with the web page from a remote server. The browser then renders the HTML into the displayed web page.
Web pages accessed over the Internet, whether by a hyperlink, opening directly via an “open” button in the browser, or some other means, are commonly downloaded into the volatile cache of a local computer system. In a computer system, for example, the volatile cache is a high speed buffer that temporarily stores web pages from accessed remote web sites. The volatile cache thus enables a user to quickly review web pages that were already downloaded, thereby eliminating the need to repeat the relatively slow process of traversing the Internet to access previously viewed web pages. This is called local caching.
On the server side, the first web servers were merely HTTP servers that resolved universal resource locators (URLs) by extracting literally from the URL the path to a file that contained the needed page, and transmitting the page back to the browser. Such a server was very simple; it could only be used to access static pages.
A “static” page is a page which, each time it is requested and served to a requestor, has the same byte content. That is, it does not matter which requestor is requesting the page, when the requester is requesting the page, etc., the byte content of that page remains the same. By contrast, a “dynamic page” is a page which has byte content that may change depending upon the particular requester, when the page is being requested, etc. This will be discussed further below.
It is important that web pages be served as quickly as possible, both to reduce the response time to a single user, and to increase the number of users that can be served concurrently. To improve the response time, caches are used by the Web server. Web server caches are used to store web page responses in a readily accessible memory location so that when the web page is requested by a user, the previously cached web page response can be retrieved from cache and served quickly to the user.
Caching web page responses by the web server works quite well for web page responses having static content, i.e., content that doesn't change frequently. An example of a static web page is one, at a company's web site, comprising a compilation of text and graphics objects describing that company's history.
In fact, classic web servers cache static pages quite effectively. Specifically, classic web servers serve web page responses, some of which are static, namely, responses comprising HTML from the file system. Each of the static responses has a modified date associated with it that is maintained by the file system. These pages are cached easily by the web server. The contents of the response and its associated modification date are simply stored in the cache. When a subsequent request is received by the server for that page, the server requests the latest modification date for that page from the file system and compares the latest modification date with the modification date associated with the cached response. If the latest modification date is the same as the modification date associated with the cached response, the cached response is served. If the latest modification date is later than the modification date associated with the cached response, the cached response is considered “stale” and a “fresh” response is retrieved and built by the web server for serving to the requesting user. The fresh response, along with its associated modification date, is cached to replace the stale response. This caching scheme saves the time that otherwise would have been spent to build requested pages which otherwise could have been cached using this classic caching scheme.
However, newer web servers provide not only static web pages but also dynamic web pages, i.e., a page having byte content that may change depending upon the particular requester, when the page is being requested, etc. Examples of dynamic web pages are pages containing content from a number of different sources or pages having computed content. For example, a page may contain macros that compute content for the page, i.e., the page has “computable content”. These macros may change the page content each time the page is accessed. This makes it difficult to cache that page using the classic caching method described above. (Macros, or formulas as they are named in Lotus Notes software, are expressions that perform a function, such as determining field values, defining what documents appear in a view, or calculate values for a column. Lotus Notes is available from Lotus Development Corporation in Cambridge, Mass.)
Or, the page may contain information from a number of different sources, that information may or may not have associated modified dates making it difficult, if not impossible, to cache using the classic caching method. For example, the page may comprise a composite of a number of “parts” including: other documents, designs from databases, content from databases, the present user's identity, the current time, the current environment, etc. Some of these parts are actual entities in the system, e.g., documents, databases, etc. Some parts though are “virtual” and are used to model the effects of the execution of macros or scripts, e.g., the user's identity may be accessed via one of a number of @functions such as @UserName, @UserRoles, etc. in Lotus Notes software. (“@functions” are macros for performing specialized tasks in Lotus Notes formulas. They can be used to format text strings, generate dates and times, format dates and times, evaluate conditional statements, calculate numeric values, calculate values in a list, convert text to numbers or numbers to text, or activate agents, actions, buttons, or hotspots.) These various part types are computable parts and have correspondingly various t
Batchelder Edward M.
Chamberlain John T.
Dumont Charles E.
Wharton Andrew J.
International Business Machines - Corporation
Lim Krisna
Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky and Popeo P.C.
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