HTML5 apps can use Cache Manifests to configure the browser’s Application Cache, allowing faster startup of HTML5 apps and also offline operation.
There is a problem, however. The behaviour of cache manifests can make development a smidge tricky . This is because the browser will only check if the contents of the Application Cache have changed if the Cache Manifest has changed. You can manually edit this file every time, but you’d probably rather not.
So here’s some alternatives:
cache.manifest
using a “Go Live” scriptIf you stage your code to a development server using a “Go Live” script,
you can update the cache.manifest
contents whenever the files
contained in it change.
This script uses sed, and illustrates the approach:
#!/bin/bash
DATETIME=`date +%Y-%m-%d\ %H:%M:%S`
sed -i -e "s/^#DATE.*/#DATE $DATETIME/" cache.manifest
This looks for comment lines starting with #DATE
and fills in the
current date. The -i
option causes sed to modify the original file.
Whenever you run the script, the manifest file is updated, and since files are reloaded unless the cache.manifest is byte-for-byte identical, the changed comment is enough to cause it to reload.
cache.manifest
using SSIIf your web server supports Server Side Includes, you can use them in a similar way to make a dynamic cache manifest. SSIs are usually used to make dynamic HTML, as suggested by their formatting, but there’s no reason they can’t be used for other types of document:
CACHE MANIFEST
# <!--#flastmod file="index.html"-->
# <!--#flastmod file="whatever.js"-->
# <!--#flastmod file="whatever.css"-->
whatever.js
whatever.css
The tactic is the same: the ‘‘flastmod’’ directive inserts the last modification time of the file, so changing any of those files will cause the comments in the cache.manifest to change, and that will cause the browser to reload the files.
In Apache, the configuration looks something like this:
Alias /whatever /var/www/whatever
<Directory /var/www/whatever>
Options +Includes
AddHandler server-parsed .manifest
</Directory>
CacheDisable /whatever/ihealth.manifest
You are, of course, paying a penalty in terms of server overhead: the
server has to stat
several files, and always returns the entire
cache.manifest in a 200
reply rather than returning a 304
. But this
is quite possibly a worthwhile tradeoff in a lot of situations.