Dynamically generated web content: Research and technology practices

Abstract

This chapter takes a tutorial approach to present the Web-related technologies and content middleware that attempt to accelerate the generation and optimize the delivery of dynamic content. It covers the historical aspects of dynamic content and presents the reasoning behind its introduction while discussing early content middleware such as the CGI and FastCGI. It then presents the evolution of content middleware along the lines of contacted research. The discussion focuses on popular techniques that mostly include content caching and content fragmentation. It also discusses a variety of other research efforts such as hardware and low-level acceleration techniques, active caching, and delta encoding. Finally, the authors hope that this chapter will serve as an introductory tutorial to students and researchers in the field of dynamic Web content technology. © 2007, Idea Group Inc.