International Business Machines Corporation

Rajesh S Agarwalla

Subbarao K Meduri

Arun Kwangil Iyengar

George Prentice Copeland

James R H Challenger

Mark Holmes Linehan

Madhu K Chetuparambil

Srikanth Ramamurthy

Thirumale Niranjan

Brian Keith Martin

Brad Byer Topol

Steven Dale Ims

Daniel Christopher Shupp

Thomas Francis McElroy

Dinesh C Verma

Ronald Patrick Doyle

Yi Zhou

James R Giles

Marcia L Stockton

Bryan Eric Aupperle

Khalil S Amiri

Sumanthkumar Sukumar

Manu M Gugnani

Tianyu Jiang

Shih-pai Lee

Mahesh Patil

James R H Challenegr

An apparatus and method for off-loading application components to edge servers are provided. An application is made edge-aware by defining which components of the application may be run from an edge server, and which components cannot be run from an edge server. When a request is received that is to be processed by an application on an origin server, a determination is made as to whether the application contains edgable components. If so, an edgified version of the application is created. When a request is received that is handled by a component that may be run on the edge server, the request is handled by that component on the edge server. When a request is received that is handled by a component that is not edgable, the request is passed to a proxy agent which then provides the request to a broker agent on the origin server.

Apparatus and method for offloading application components to edge servers

A method, a system, an apparatus, and a computer program product are presented for a fragment caching methodology. After a message is received at a computing device, a fragment in the message body is cached. Cache ID rules from an origin server accompany a fragment to describe a method for forming a unique cache ID for the fragment such that dynamic content can be cached away from an origin server. A cache ID may be based on a URI and/or query parameters and/or cookies that are associated with a fragment. After user authentication, a cookie containing the user's role may be used in subsequent requests for role-specific fragments and in the cache identifier for role-specific fragments, thereby allowing requests from other users for role-specific fragments to be resolved in the cache when the users have the same role because these users would also have the same cookie.

Method and system for caching role-specific fragments

A method, a system, an apparatus, and a computer program product are presented for fragment caching. After a message is received at a computing device that contains a cache management unit, a fragment in the message body of the message is cached. Subsequent requests for the fragment at the cache management unit result in a cache hit. The cache management unit operates equivalently in support of fragment caching operations without regard to whether the computing device acts as a client, a server, or a hub located throughout the network; in other words, the fragment caching technique is uniform throughout a network. Cache ID rules accompany a fragment from an origin server; the cache ID rules describe a method for forming a unique cache ID for the fragment such that dynamic content can be cached away from an origin server.

Method and system for fragment linking and fragment caching

A method, system, and computer program product, by which portions of the session information that page-content is dependent upon are 'pushed' to the client from the origin server in a way such that auxiliary servers, e.g. other application servers and edge-servers, have access to the session information and fragment dependancy data to generate auxiliary-server cache-IDs for the custom pages. This enables distribution of the load away from the origin server, allowing better application distribution and scalability through more effective caching.

Method and system for generating auxiliary-server cache identifiers

A method, a system, an apparatus, and a computer program product are presented for a fragment caching methodology. Within the request path from a client to a server, a first computing device may attach to a request message a message header that indicates that the first computing device supports fragment processing; a second computing device within the request path processes this request message. When the second computing device receives a response message corresponding to the request message, it can check for a message header directive that indicates that it should cache the response message's fragment only if the response path does not have at least one computing device that supports the processing of fragments; if so, then it forwards the response message without caching its contained fragment.

Method and system for restrictive caching of user-specific fragments limited to a fragment cache closest to a user

A method, a system, an apparatus, and a computer program product are presented for a fragment caching methodology. After a message is received at a computing device that contains a cache management unit, a fragment in the message body of the message is cached. Subsequent requests for the fragment at the cache management unit result in a cache hit. A FRAGMENTLINK tag is used to specify the location in a fragment for an included or linked fragment which is to be inserted into the fragment during fragment or page assembly or page rendering. If a FRAGMENTLINK tag is present within the message body of a message, then the FRAGMENT message header for the message may indicate the presence of the FRAGMENTLINK tag with a directive for the FRAGMENT message header, e.g., using a 'contains-fragment' directive.

Method and system for caching fragments while avoiding parsing of pages that do not contain fragments

An intermediate content transcoder. An intermediate content transcoder can include a communicative receiver configured to receive master content while in transit from a content source to at least one content sink in a content distribution network, and a communicative transmitter configured to transmit transcoded content to one or more of the content sinks. A set of content transformations also can be provided. Furthermore, the intermediate content transcoder can include a set of conditions for selecting individual ones of the content transformations to be applied to master content received through the communicative receiver. Finally, the intermediate content transcoder can include a transcoder configured to apply the selected individual ones of the content transformations to the master content. The application of the content transformations can produce transcoded content. The communicative transmitter, in turn, can forward the produced transcoded content to one or more of the content sinks.

Content transcoding in a content distribution network

A method, apparatus, and computer implemented instructions for managing data in a network data processing system. A packet containing data associated with content is received. A determination is made as to whether the packet is enabled for content distribution by examining the data packet. Responsive to the packet being enabled for content distribution, the content is distributed in response to a request for the content without requiring a validity check. If the packet is not enabled for content distribution, a validity check is performed on the content using control information contained within the header of the data packet.

Method and apparatus for caching subscribed and non-subscribed content in a network data processing system

Techniques are disclosed for addressing the name space mismatch between content caching systems (which use Uniform Resource Locators, or 'URLs') and content servers (which use file and path names). A file name-to-URL mapping is created for use by content caching systems, and data in protocol response messages (and optionally in protocol request messages) is augmented to transmit information for use in creating this mapping, enabling a content caching system to automatically and dynamically populate its file name-to-URL mapping. By having the file name available, the caching system can now respond to content management messages which identify the cached content by only the content's associated file name. Techniques for encoding the message extensions include: use of new directives on existing cache-control headers in Hypertext Transfer Protocol ('HTTP') messages; addition of new headers in HTTP messages; and use of meta-data in markup languages such as Hypertext Markup Language (&#x201c;HTML&#x201d;) or Extensible Markup Language (&#x201c;XML&#x201d;) format.

Addressing the name space mismatch between content servers and content caching systems

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Pittsburgh, PA, United States of America

Rajesh S Agarwalla