Accelerating dynamic web content delivery using keyword-based fragment detection

• Authors: Daniel Brodie;Amrish Gupta;Weisong Shi
• Venue: Journal of Web Engineering
• Year: 2005

Recent advances in Web engineering have enabled the rapid growth of dynamic Web services such as Web-based email, online banking, online shopping and entertainment. We envision that finding an effective way to deliver these dynamic Web services and understanding the relationship between Web application design and delivery are two important Web engineering issues, and have not been seriously considered in the community. In this paper, we intend to tackle the first problem and pave the way for solving the second problem in the future. To efficiently serve this trend, several server-side and cache-side fragment-based techniques, which exploit reuse of Web pages at the sub-document (also known as fragment) level, have been proposed. Most of these techniques do not focus on the creation of the fragmented content from existing dynamic content. Also, existing caching techniques do not support fragment movement across the document, a common behavior in dynamic Web content. This paper presents two proposals that we have suggested to solve these problems. The first, DyCA, a dynamic content adapter, takes original dynamic Web content and converts it to fragment-enabled content. Thus the dynamic parts of the document are separated into separate fragments from the static template of the document. This is dependent on our proposed keyword-based fragment detection approach that uses predefined keywords to find these fragments and to split them out of the core document. Our second proposal, an augmentation to the ESI standard, allows splitting the information of the position of each fragment in the template from the template data itself by using a mapping table. Using this, a fragment enabled cache can have a more fine grained level of identifying fragments independent of their location on the template, which enables it to take into account fragment behaviors such as fragment movement. We used the content taken from three real Web sites to achieve a detailed performance evaluation of our proposals. Our results show that our keyword-based approach for fragment detection and extraction provides us with cacheable fragments that, when combined with our proposed mapping table augmentation, can provide significant advantages for fragment-based Web caching of existing dynamic Web content.