WebCaL - a domain specific language for web caching

Web caching aims to improve the performance of the Internet in three ways - by improving client latency, alleviating network traffic and reducing serv er load. A web cache is basically a limited store of information which help s in presenting a faster web-access environment to the clients. The perform ance of a cache depends on proper management of this information and effect ive inter-cache communication. The existing web caches have simple and hard -coded policies which are not best suited for all environments. They offer limited flexibility just in the form of changing some simple parameters suc h as cache size, peer caches, etc. This drawback motivates the need for a f ramework for building new web caches tailored to specific environments. In this paper, we describe a domain specific language based on an event-action model using which new local web cache policies and inter-cache protocols c an be easily specified. This should make it possible to write a new policy or protocol quickly, evaluate its performance and test it thoroughly using the complete program-execute-debug cycle. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Sc ience B.V.