Sign in / up

back to article CloudFlare's Railgun protocol gets buy-in from web giants

Web hosters and cloud operators have charged up their infrastructure with CloudFlare's 'Railgun' WAN optimization technology, giving developers the 'net over an easy way to dramatically speed the loading of dynamic pages. The wide-area network optimization technology makes it possible to cache content at the byte level within …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Or, you could, y'know, design you pages right?

    Of course we need this intrusive caching system inspecting every page, because you cannot design a page that only contains the items that change, with all the static content stored elsewhere. After all, it's not like you could design a page that was just a small XML file of the data that changes, with an embedded link to an external XSLT that contains all the unchanging elements, and let the browser do the expansion. It's not like that would allow caching, content distribution, local caching in the browser, better separation of data and presentation, better scaling to the rendering environment, or anything like that.

    2 1
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Or, you could, y'know, design you pages right?

      You are, of course, correct.

      However, the fact that this solution has emerged suggests that some who "design" web pages do not do as you so sensibly suggest. It should also not be necessary to employ street sweepers or parking inspectors because, y'know, it is possible to not litter and to always follow the rules when parking.

      0 0
    2. Comments are attributed to your handle
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Down

      Re: Or, you could, y'know, design you [sic] pages right?

      Many sites are already designed like that. Ever hear of this thing called Ajax?

      The point is, not every site should be designed with asynchronously loaded content. Do you want your favorite news site to appear blank for the first few seconds while the "ever changing" content is loaded from the server?

      The purpose of Railgun is to provide a layer of optimization and caching on top of sites that wouldn't benefit from being "Ajaxified". The so-called "intrusive caching system" that you allude to is really nothing more than an automated static version of Ajax. The difference is, instead of stitching together the static and dynamic content in the browser, it is done on the CloudFlare servers.

      (By the way, does anyone really use XSLT?)

      0 0
      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Or, you could, y'know, design you [sic] pages right?

        > By the way, does anyone really use XSLT?

        An excellent question. Would a webdesigner even understand XSLT?

        0 0
        1. Pen-y-gors
          Reply Icon

          Re: Or, you could, y'know, design you [sic] pages right?

          I've tried, believe me, I've tried....spawn of the devil it is!

          0 0
      2. G_232
        Reply Icon

        Re: Or, you could, y'know, design you [sic] pages right?

        'Do you want your favorite news site to appear blank for the first few seconds while the "ever changing" content is loaded from the server?'

        You know...I'd be fine with that as long as the overall loading speed was faster. I don't have the technical background that you all seem to have, but only downloading the bits that change seems to make sense.

        0 0
    3. Pen-y-gors
      Reply Icon

      Re: Or, you could, y'know, design you pages right?

      It's possible to design an entire site with hundreds of pages that use ajax to load up the variable content - but you end up with a site of hundreds of 'pages' that are all called index.html, and a back button that is pointless.

      Ajax is pretty neat, but only for some things.

      0 0
    4. streaky
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      Re: Or, you could, y'know, design you pages right?

      Can't tell if OP is being sarcastic or not, but basically everything he said is junk. It's hard to even see where the problem actually is. XSLT is proven worthless so.....

      If you have a problem with an automated system reading your pages for whatever reason, firstly don't use the internet, at all. Secondly this is what SSL is and third, they don't give a damn what's in your pages :)

      P.S. I actually just always figured railgun was just riverbed kit by another name?

      1 1
  2. wim

    ironic

    that the link provided to the reg page gives me a 404 error

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/22/azure_problem_that_should_never_happen_ever/%22

    0 0
  3. wolfy_

    It apened.

    Cloudflare ecosystem is down for 40 minutes now :o

    0 0
This topic is closed for new posts.