A survey on dynamic Web content generation and delivery techniques

While Web applications serve personal needs and business functions almost in every area, the responsiveness and performance of Web applications is the key factor to their success. With continuous innovation on Web technology, Web sites have evolved from document Web to application Web and further to service Web recently. During the evolution course, Web sites serving dynamic content started to grow exponentially to dominate the area. Dynamic pages require servers to generate the response content per-user request before delivering it back to the user, which introduces network traffic, server workload and results in extra latency. This drew tremendous efforts from both research and industry on how to accelerate the dynamic content generation and distribution in order to reduce the user perceived latency and improve the application performance, among which caching is a vital technology. This paper attempts to survey the innovative research and products recently published in this area and presents them in a road map style. It first examines the dynamic characteristics of Web applications and the inherent challenges for caching. Then the rest of this paper explores the varied acceleration solutions on content generation process and content delivery process, respectively, followed by the analysis of how different caching solutions fit Web applications of different characteristics. Finally it ends with the future trends on Web caching technique and a summary of the survey.