IT-блоги • Netlify Dynamic Site Challenge : Building News Article Cache Management playground

This is a submission for the Netlify Dynamic Site Challenge: Build with Blobs.

Why Catch Control is required:

Fetching resources over the network is both slow and expensive:

• Large responses require many round trips between the browser and the server.
• Your page won't load until all its critical resources have been downloaded completely.
• If a user on your site has a limited mobile data plan, every unnecessary network request is a waste of their money.

How can you avoid unnecessary network requests? The browser's Cache is your first line of defense. It's not necessarily the most powerful or flexible approach, and you have limited control over the lifetime of cached responses, but it's effective, it's supported in all browsers, and it doesn't require much work.

How the HTTP Cache works

All HTTP requests the browser makes are routed first to the browser cache to check whether there's a valid cached response that can be used to fulfill the request. If there's a match, the response is read from the cache, which eliminates both the network latency and the transfer's data costs.

The HTTP Cache's behavior is controlled by a combination of request headers and response headers. In an ideal scenario, you have control over both the code for your web app, which determines the request headers, and your web server's configuration, which determines the response headers.

What I Built

I've built a high-performance news application using Angular and the NewsAPI. I've implemented Netlify's cache control mechanisms, specifically Stale-While-Revalidate (SWR), to ensure a seamless user experience with a balance between fresh content and lightning-fast loading times.

    headers: {
      "Content-Type": "application/json",
      "Cache-Control": "public, max-age=0, must-revalidate", // Tell browsers to always revalidate
      "Netlify-CDN-Cache-Control": "public, max-age=0, stale-while-revalidate=31536000", // Tell Edge to cache asset for up to a year
    }

Demo

Platform Primitives

News Article Cache Management with Angular, NewsAPI, and Netlify Cache Control

1. Dynamic Content Delivery with Stale-While-Revalidate (SWR):

• This pattern tells our Edge to serve a cached response even when it’s stale, but revalidate it in the background without requiring the client to wait for the result.
• Set netlify-cdn-cache-control to "public, max-age=0, stale-while-revalidate=86400" in Netlify configuration.
• This instructs Netlify's CDN to:
  • Serve cached content immediately (max-age=0).
  • If cached content is absent or outdated (older than 86400 seconds/24 hours), fetch fresh data from NewsAPI in the background.
  • Deliver the latest content to the user while simultaneously updating the cache for subsequent requests.

2. Granular Cache Control with Custom Headers:

• Leverage custom Cache-Control headers for more fine-grained control over different content types:
  • For frequently updated breaking news: Cache-Control: no-cache to bypass the cache entirely.
  • For static site elements: Cache-Control: max-age=31536000 (1 year) for long-term caching.

3. Monitoring and Optimization:

• Monitor cache behavior using Netlify's analytics or browser developer tools to assess effectiveness and identify areas for fine-tuning.
• Experiment with different cache durations (max-age values) to strike the optimal balance between freshness and performance.

Implementation Guidelines:

• Integrate the NewsAPI data into the Angular application using Netlify function HTTP requests
• Manage cache control headers using Netlify function configuration