I'm working on a RESTful API for an application (much thanks for
Catalyst::Controller::REST, by the way) and need to handle the
If-Modified-Since header to efficiently check when things have changed.
It seems my controllers will follow the pattern:
1. Initial validation of the request and get the base object that
the request is about.
2. Check for If-Modified-Since header.
If it is present and no older than the last-modified date of
the object, return a 304 status with no body.
3. Otherwise, set the Last-modified and Expires headers. (The latter
to keep Firefox from caching the result too long.)
4. If a HEAD request, exit.
Otherwise return the object, which involves some more reads from the
database etc.
I've looked at the Cache::HTTP plugin, but it doesn't do what I want, which
is to pre-empt running queries if they don't need to be run.
Is there another plugin for doing this sort of thing?
If not, I am thinking of writing a plugin that would work something like
$c->if_unmodified( headers => $sub1, content => $sub2 );
where $sub1 would be code to set the last-modified and maybe weak etags
(based on the last-modified if nothing else is specified).
The method would check for a If-Match and If-Modified-Since headers, etc. If
they matched, it would return a 304 error, otherwise it would run $sub2.
Does this seem a worthwhile endeavor?
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