Yet Another Servlet Filter You Can't Live Without

At work, we were looking for ways to reduce bandwidth usage on our secure applications. We already have the compression filter, various object caches, etc-- everything you read about. Then we started looking into caveats with using SSL and found something surprising-- HTTP 1.1 SSL usage prevents ANY content from being cached on the user's drive. "So you mean those massive JavaScript and Stylesheet files are getting pulled down with each secure page?" Yes, images too-- multiple times on a single page even.

The solution? Yet another Servlet Filter you can't live without that will be bound to your static content such as Javascript, CSS, and image files. The code for the filter is only a couple lines, but the goal is to write out the 'Cache-Control' header and the 'Expires' header.

long durationSeconds = 28800; // 8 hours

response.setDateHeader("Expires",

          System.currentTimeMillis()

          + (duractionSeconds * 1000));

response.setHeader("Cache-Control",

          "public, max-age="

          + durationSeconds);

chain.doFilter(request, response);

I couldn't believe how much bandwidth we are now saving with our SSL applications. Read more here.