Cacheable GET requests with KSS¶

KSS best known for the inline editing in Plone. There's a lot more you can do with it. But most of the usage I've seen concerns modifying something. And if you modify something, you need a POST request in http land. The other request you can do, a GET request, is defined as something that you can do multiple times without changing anything. So you can press "reload" in your browser on ordinary pages just fine, but re-submitting a comment 20 times with POST results in 20 identical comments.

So KSS by default uses POST for its requests, as there's often a change involved. The downside is that POST requests aren't cacheable. So a simple KSS plugin that fetches a list of images from the server and that displays a random one from that list keeps on hitting the server. Even though that list of images changes only once a year or so.

Balasz Ree has a branch of KSS that allows GET requests. It only needs reviewing to land in KSS trunk. But we (= zest software ) needed it now, so Balasz cooked up kss.plugin.cacheability that allows GET to work in the current KSS version. It'll provide an easy migration path once the GET functionality itself has landed on trunk.

So if you have KSS requests that don't change a thing and that are expensive 'cause they're POST instead of GET: try it out!