jQuery.XFrame is a client-side include system built on top of AJAX. It is designed to simplify the development of cache friendly dynamic websites by simplifying the complexity of combining static content with dynamic content (or more generally, content with different caching strategies).
XFrame stands for eXternal Frame. It works a bit like an <iframe> tag, but its much easier to script.
jQuery.XFrame depends on jQuery 1.4.1+.
The default minified distribution of jQuery.XFrame is available in public/.
To build a custom distribution, please copy install.yaml to site.yaml and update the appropriate configuration options. The use rake install to install jQuery.XFrame.
Building websites that are cache-friendly is difficult. Building websites that are both cache-friendly and dynamic is even more complex.
jQuery.XFrame allows HTML content with different caching strategies to be combined easily. It also imposes a light structure which to ensure best-practice when it comes to caching dynamically generated content.
As an example, consider a blog with comments. Comments can be generated in real time, but blog content is only generated once (or updated very infrequently).
We have a number of concerns:
- Blog content should be produced quickly for the end user.
- End user can add comments and see them immediately.
- Search engine can see blog content and possibly comments, but time frame does not need to be instantaneous.
- All content should be cached if possible.
In this case, we can use jQuery.XFrame to update comments dynamically. The first step is to take the existing page which includes blog content and comments, and wrap the comments using XFrame. The comments section should then be extracted to a partial view. The partial view should be made available via a standard web request.
The page should be rendered as per normal. Once the page is rendered, it can be cached for a long time, say 8 hours. When the page is served to the client, comments may be up to 8 hours old, so, new comments are missing. But, XFrame is triggered once the page has finished loading. This will request the partial from the web server. This content may have a cache time of 10 minutes, so comments are at most 10 minutes late, or even generated in real time. The content on the 8 hour old cache is updated with the new comments.
Copyright, 2011, 2015, by Samuel G. D. Williams. http://www.codeotaku.com
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