I am primarily a front-end developer/designer, however recently, I've been exploring end to end solutions. Yesterday I finished a TODO application using the mean stack and would like to start exploring deployment options to my VPS.
That being said, I've been advised to use nginx as a reverse proxy is for serving up static resources? Unfortunately, I'm getting stuck on simple questions.
What are the example static resource?
What factors define static resources?
What are examples of non-static resources?
Lastly, are there any weird edge-cases I should be aware of?
Sorry about the noobness of this question.
In this case, a static resource refers to one that is not generated with code on the fly, meaning that its contents won't change from request to request.
Images, JavaScript, CSS, etc., are all candidates for this. Basically, you set a large cache time for these resources, and your Nginx servers can keep a copy on disk (or in Redis or something similar) so that they are ready to return to the client without hitting your application servers.
It's important to remember to use versioned file names when setting large cache times. header-image-20140608.png for example, means you can have a later version without worrying about the old one still being in the cache.
A static resource is something that isn't generated dynamically.
An example of a static resource is an image. It's the same for each and every request. It's a file on the filesystem that doesn't require any processing - you simply tell nginx send this file as-is to the user.
An example of a dynamic resource is json data specific to the user requesting it (it has to be generated specifically for that user).
With a dynamic resource these is also often your own domain specific code executed, a request to the database etc.
The reason nginx should serve static content is because it excels at serving this content in a parallel way - it was designed exactly for this.
If you are using Ruby/Python/node.js/Java etc, you can also serve static resources through these processes (Just call File.open() and start streaming the data) - however it would be much slower, and also lower the number of simultaneous dynamic requests you could serve.
- A static resource is resource which will not be changed frequently and this can be stored on client's browser end unless required , to prevent load on web server and loading the site faster at client end.
- Some examples of these are : images, javascript, css
- A dynamic resource is the content that changes on a web resource which is mainly data that keeps changing on a page which is specific to a user or items.
- In order to make sure that your static data reduces the load on your server and ensures fast performance on client end you need to take care of various server specific configurations like enabling the compressing of js files , rendering the header content for images properly.
When you want to change the file content make sure you prevent the browser from picking this static old content from cache, attach a time stamp with the urls of these static resources which will ensure upldated resource is loaded when needed
Static resources mean resources that don't change and do not involve server-side code.
This typically means images, CSS, and somethimes client-side Javascript.
