在Tomcat和Spring MVC中进行缓存

Question

I have a web application that gets deployed as war file into a Tomcat container. The application itself has two main aspects:

1. It uses Spring MVC to provide REST endpoints
2. It ships an AngularJS based single page application as static content. Technically there is an index.html in the root webapp folder that uses an html http-equiv="refresh" redirect to redirect to the actual index.html in a subfolder.

When I update the application I frequently notice that the browser does not load the latest version from the server and just shows some older cached version. For example the website shows the current version number on the login page, so if I update it from 1.0.5 to 1.0.6, I often find that the browser still shows 1.0.5 even if I reload the page. Pressing CTRL+F5 to ignore the cache usually solves this temporarily.

I am not very familiar with the whole caching topic, so I am looking for resources to get started.

Questions:

• Is the caching problem something that I must configure in Spring?
• Is it rather something that must be configured in Tomcat when I deploy the war file?
• Is it possible that the problem is caused by the html redirect mentioned above?

Answer 1

These tags should help to prevent reading from cache

<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
 <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache">
 <meta http-equiv="Expires" content="Sat, 01 Dec 2001 00:00:00 GMT">

The Cache-Control header was added in HTTP 1.1, while the other two were also present in HTTP 1.0.

Answer 2

Pressing CTRL+F5 to ignore the cache usually solves this temporarily.

I believe this means that the whole thing is in browser caching/HTTP caching .

Solution 1.

Disable cache in Google Chrome via settings (or find a similar article for your browser).

Solution 2.

Browser caching is actually controlled by the Cache-Control header.

You can avoid this condition if you tell your browser not to cache the dynamic content. To do this, you'd have to write some cache-control header.

Well, in the Java Spring Framework, there is a very easy way to stop dynamic content caching. In your servlet context, just declare a bean WebContentInterceptor and define its properties.

<mvc:interceptors>
    <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.LocaleChangeInterceptor" p:paramName="lang"/>
    <mvc:interceptor>
        <mvc:mapping path="/**"/>
        <mvc:exclude-mapping path="/resources/**"/>
        <bean id="webContentInterceptor" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.WebContentInterceptor">
            <property name="cacheSeconds" value="0"/>
            <property name="useExpiresHeader" value="true"/>
            <property name="useCacheControlHeader" value="true"/>
            <property name="useCacheControlNoStore" value="true"/>
        </bean>
    </mvc:interceptor>
</mvc:interceptors>