RESTful Java with JAX-RS

Chapter 10. Scaling JAX-RS Applications

When studying the Web, one can’t help but notice how massively scalable it is. There are hundreds of thousands of websites and billions of requests per day traveling across it. Terabytes of data are downloaded from the Internet every hour. Websites like Amazon and Bank of America process millions of transactions per day. In this chapter, I’ll discuss some features of the Web, specifically within HTTP, that make it more scalable and how you can take advantage of these features within JAX-RS applications.

Caching

Caching is one of the more important features of the Web. When you visit a website for the first time, your browser stores images and static text in memory and on disk. If you revisit the site within minutes, hours, days, or even months, your browser doesn’t have to reload the data over the network and can instead pick it up locally. This greatly speeds up the rendering of revisited web pages and makes the browsing experience much more fluid. Browser caching not only helps page viewing, it also cuts down on server load. If the browser is obtaining images or text locally, it is not eating up scarce server bandwidth or CPU cycles.

Besides browser caching, there are also proxy caches. Proxy caches are pseudo web servers that work as middlemen between browsers and websites. Their sole purpose is to ease the load on master servers by caching static content and serving it to clients directly, bypassing the main servers. Content delivery networks ...