The Gecko NFS Web proxy

The World-Wide Web provides remote access to pages using its own naming sch eme (URLs), transfer protocol (HTTP), and cache algorithms. Not only does u sing these special-purpose mechanisms have performance implications, but th ey make it impossible for standard Unix applications to access the Web. Gec ko is a system that provides access to the Web via the NFS protocol. URLs a re mapped to Unix file names, providing unmodified applications access to W eb pages; pages are transferred from the Gecko server to the clients using NFS instead of HTTP, significantly improving performance; and NFS's cache c onsistency mechanism ensures that all clients have the same version of a pa ge. Applications access pages as they would Unix files. A client-side proxy translates HTTP requests into file accesses, allowing existing Web applica tions to use Gecko. Experiments performed on our prototype show that Gecko is able to provide this additional functionality at a performance level tha t exceeds that of HTTP. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rig hts reserved.