Simon Willison's item about Greasemonkey etiquette has grown an interesting comment thread. As community sites generate more and more data that people increasingly want to mine, questions of load distribution will continue to arise. Ryan Tomayko writes:
It would be interesting to see if we could create some kind of caching-proxy-mesh for community tools like delicious.
Being able to support various types of caching intermediaries is one of the major design goals of HTTP after all. #
His comment prompted me to refresh my rusty understanding of how reverse proxies work. I have no idea how such things might be woven together into a grassroots grid, but the way things are going lately I won't be at all surprised to see that happen.
Among other useful outcomes, the targeting of applications to such a grid would help to clarify longstanding issues about service APIs that are ostensibly RESTful but that use GET rather than POST in ways that thwart intermediation.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/04/13.html#a1214