Comments on: Tomcat – No caching of RESTlet resources for Firefox

By: Mark Needham

Mark Needham — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:22:30 +0000

Ah cool, good to know.

‘Cache-Control’, ‘no-cache’ and
‘Pragma’, ‘no-cache’

seem to already be set by RESTlet by default. I didn’t know about the other ones though.

Thanks, Mark

By: Darren Hobbs

Darren Hobbs — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:53:15 +0000

Sorry, also forgot to add that for the definitive guide to HTTP caching (and probably way more than you ever wanted to know about HTTP!) Check out this section of the HTTP spec.

By: Darren Hobbs

Darren Hobbs — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:39:43 +0000

There is a standard incantation for persuading web caches not to cache your stuff. You need more than what you've currently got. This should cover most flavours of proxy and web browser:

    private void invokeTheCachePreventionIncantation(HttpServletResponse response) {
        response.setHeader("Cache-Control", "no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate"); //HTTP 1.1
        // Set IE extended HTTP/1.1 no-cache headers (use addHeader).
        response.addHeader("Cache-Control", "post-check=0, pre-check=0");
        response.setHeader("Pragma", "no-cache"); //HTTP 1.0
        response.setDateHeader("Expires", 0); //prevents caching at the proxy server
    }