Edge Side Includes

Edge Side Includes (ESI) is a small markup language for edge level dynamic web content assembly. The purpose of ESI is to tackle the problem of web infrastructure scaling. It is an application of edge computing. It is fairly common for websites to have generated content. It could be because of changing content like catalogs or forums, or because of personalization. This creates a problem for caching systems. To overcome this problem a group of companies (Akamai, Art Technology Group, BEA Systems, Circadence Corporation, Digital Island, Inc., Interwoven, Inc., Open Market, whose ESI-related technology is now owned by FatWire Software, Oracle Corporation and Vignette Corporation) developed the ESI specification and submitted it to the W3C for approval. The proposal editor was Mark Nottingham. ESI Language Specification 1.0 was submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for approval in August 2001. The W3C has acknowledged receipt, but has not accepted the proposal. ESI is implemented by some content delivery networks, such as Akamai, and by some caching proxy servers such as Varnish, Squid and Mongrel ESI, although many do not implement the complete specification. Akamai also adds additional features to the version they support.

Edge Side Includes (ESI) is a small markup language for edge level dynamic web content assembly. The purpose of ESI is to tackle the problem of web infrastructure scaling. It is an application of edge computing. It is fairly common for websites to have generated content. It could be because of changing content like catalogs or forums, or because of personalization. This creates a problem for caching systems. To overcome this problem a group of companies (Akamai, Art Technology Group, BEA Systems, Circadence Corporation, Digital Island, Inc., Interwoven, Inc., Open Market, whose ESI-related technology is now owned by FatWire Software, Oracle Corporation and Vignette Corporation) developed the ESI specification and submitted it to the W3C for approval. The proposal editor was Mark Nottingham. ESI Language Specification 1.0 was submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for approval in August 2001. The W3C has acknowledged receipt, but has not accepted the proposal. ESI is implemented by some content delivery networks, such as Akamai, and by some caching proxy servers such as Varnish, Squid and Mongrel ESI, although many do not implement the complete specification. Akamai also adds additional features to the version they support. In this case the ESI processor would retrieve the src URL, or failing that the alt URL, or if that failed do nothing. The ESI system is usually a caching proxy server so it may have a local copy of these files which it can insert without going back to the server. Alternatively the whole page with the ESI tags may be cached, and only the ESI requests may be made to the origin server. This allows different caching times for different parts of the page, or different degrees of personalisation.

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Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1375626721 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.