As you may know, one of the talks I’m giving this year is HTTP caching 101.

I feel it’s important to educate everyone on HTTP. One of the interesting things is the fact that the spec names things in a very, well, strange way.

Take my good friend Ayende that complains about Silverlight not respecting the HTTP specification. Now I think everyone will agree that Oren is a brilliant person, so if he gets it wrong, it’s probably the spec that sucks. Point is, silverlight is not necessarily wrong in this case.

See, a resource representation (the thing that is controlled by caching instructions) can be in three states: Up-to-date, fresh and stale.

Up-to date representations are the ones that we know are current according to the origin server.

When a representation is being sent back with no expiry and no caching instructions, it’s allowed (and encouraged) to cache it for however long an implementation may decide, it’s left up to the developers. The spec encourages using heuristics for this. If you want something more reliable, you should provide a max-age or an Expires (or ideally, both).

Now, as long as the representation hasn’t expired, it’s considered by caches (proxies or your browser cache) as fresh.

Now that’s where things become confusing. When you send back a must-revalidate with your response, it doesn’t mean that the client needs to revalidate at all times with the server. It means that a client needs to revalidate once the representation is stale, aka it has gone over it’s expiration date. In the case ayende shows here, the client makes the decision that the data was cacheable previously (I’d think that the response would’ve had a Last-Modified so heuristics could kick in), and so doesn’t see the point of asking the server to validate a fresh cache entry. This is why when Oren added the Expires header in the past, the entry became stale on arrival, making must-revalidate work as expected.

So what if you want the client to revalidate always before serving a cached entry? In that case, you can send a no-cache, which of course doesn’t mean do not cache. It means that the client needs to revalidate both fresh and stale entries, and then may use the cached copy if it’s up to date.

So to sum up: no-cache doesn’t mean do not cache, must-revalidate doesn’t mean always revalidate, most people get http caching wrong because it is not intuitive Thankfully, if you come to my talk, or my ReST training course, or use the openrasta-caching plugin, you won’t have to care much about those problems.

OpenRasta has been there for many years, and is the most widely used alternative framework for ReST applications.

OpenWrap has been there for a year and a half, and has some usage for advanced users wanting a nicely-architected package manager that doesn’t take dependencies on lots and lots of other technologies and doesn’t require VS.

And we have sub-projects, such as OpenFileSystem, an IO abstraction library that ought to make using the file system easier, shipping with an in-memory version that should work the same way as your target operating system.

Now all those projects are at varying stages in their life, and the amount of work I used to give to only OpenRasta has been vastly disolved, which in turns means that some users are starting to get quite annoyed with our dreadful homepage and our lack of binary downloads.

Add to this the competitive pressure on OpenRasta introduced by Nancy and the future openrasta copycat WebAPI from the photocopier machine Microsoft, and you’ll understand that the current trend is not sustainable.

This year I’ve decided to simplify my life and delegate much more of my work to a community that has been so far very supportive but very unwilling to contribute anything back. I also want to go back to enjoying working on OSS software to build great solutions and not focus my energy on simply competing with any tool and framework microsoft invents to duplicate existing OSS solutions. I have a vision and I want to deliver on that, OpenRasta and OpenWrap are two sides of that, and I want to start making them work together the way I want without having to be dragged in competitive races with Microsoft’s marketing dollars.

So we had a planning meeting with some of the companies that use OpenRasta in anger in London and want to step up their contributions (7digital and huddle, we love you guys!), and decided that we were going to change how things are done in the OpenEverything projects.

Project organization

First and foremost, I’m going to contribute much less to the 2.1 branch of OpenRasta, and patches / merges / new builds are going to be handled by the contributors that are given write access to the git repository. This gives away a lot of my power.

I’m going to be focusing on the outstanding modules for OpenRasta that add a whole bunch of functionality that will be rolled-back in 3.0: the caching module (soon to arrive in 0.2 version), the new config API (with compact fluent API and convention-based config) and the dynamic / json out-of-the-box support. There’s also a new openrasta-diagnostics module that I’ve started building and want to get out there. I’ll also contribute some work towards the async support that has been requested by some.

OpenFileSystem 2.0 is going to be under Henrik Feldt supervision, and will be a merge of the amazing work he did on long-path and transactional file system support.

All of our versioning is going to be a strict application of http://semver.org 2.0 (which is now the only standard in OpenWrap), so that will solve any breaking changes being introduced without knowing.

Of course, OSS is not a democracy, so I keep a veto right on certain changes that would impact future versions, or architectural changes that do not fit with the vision I have for all those projects. This is give and take, I give some of the control of more than 4 years worth of my development time, but I will keep the main architect role for the time being.

As for releases, anytime someone with commit access wants to create a new release, the process is very simple: they email on the mailing list, and if there’s no majority opposition, we have a new build. Simples.

Orphaned projects

Sadly, we do have some orphaned projects in all this. Mostly, the container support for each of the IoC containers is not up-to-date for StructureMap (tests are broken) and Unity (I have no understanding of the code, so while I think I fixed the latest build, I can’t try it out). At this stage, anyone with a vested interest in those projects should start contributing and come help out, or risk that code not being maintained anymore.

OSS is not just take, it’s give too

That leaves a real question for those companies that have used OpenRasta to make money and provide a killer-architecture and have contributed absolutely nothing back since the beginning.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I give the code away on everything, so it is a company’s legal right to take and not give back. As a side-effect, it is my complete right to completely ignore those that make money on our hard work and want to keep it all to themselves, and my responsibility to not prioritize the needs of those that contributes over those that are selfish..

OSS is also about giving back, and this year it’s what is being enforced on the OpenEverything projects. Fostering contributions is what we want to get to. No more free-lunch though, that’s for sure.

Conclusion

This new organization should let OpenRasta absorb patches and get on the 2.1 release cycle faster, and then on to 2.2, etc. This will allow me to focus on what I want to build for 3.0, and this will also allow more contributors to own projects more directly than before.

If you have comments or feedback on all those new plans, please let us know on the now unified openeverything-dev mailing list.

Please don’t use it for user questions, we’ve moved all support of all those frameworks to stackoverflow where google can do its job and users can find their answers more quickly.

I’ll be touring the north of Britain from the 18th of January with two talks: HTTP caching 101 and Links, forms and Unicorns.

The details are at http://www.gep13.co.uk/blog/?p=609 so if you’re interested in HTTP or/and ReST, do come along!