Enhancing the World-Wide Web through Transparent Integration of Document Replication

摘要

It is widely accepted that replicating critical data improves performance and availability. Despite of these advantages replication is still not in use for the World-wide Web. This is remarkable as today's World-wide Web suffers from high workload and high response time which are mainly caused by long distance network traffic. Through the use of replication the situation can be significantly improved by replicating frequently accessed documents and distributing replicas throughout the network. In contrast to currently used Web-caching techniques, replication allows controlled dissemination acroos the Web. In this paper, we present an architecture which allows the management of replicated World-Wide Web documents. We have implemented a first prototype which is based on our archtiecture. It provides full replication transparency to the user. Additionally, the system offers highly efficient document retrieval and does not require rewriting possibly licensed code of HTTP clients.