Abstract
The World-Wide Web provides remote access to pages using its own naming scheme (URLs), transfer protocol (HTTP), and cache algorithms. Not only does using these special-purpose mechanisms have performance implications, but they make it impossible for standard Unix applications to access the Web. Gecko is a system that provides access to the Web via the NFS protocol. URLs are mapped to Unix file names, providing unmodified applications access to Web pages; pages are transferred from the Gecko server to the clients using NFS instead of HTTP, significantly improving performance; and NFS's cache consistency mechanism ensures that all clients have the same version of a page. Applications access pages as they would Unix files. A client-side proxy translates HTTP requests into file accesses, allowing existing Web applications to use Gecko. Experiments performed on our prototype show that Gecko is able to provide this additional functionality at a performance level that exceeds that of HTTP.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1725-1736 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Computer Networks |
Volume | 31 |
Issue number | 11 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - May 17 1999 |
Event | The WWW8: 8th International World Wide Web Conference - Toronto, Ont., Can Duration: May 11 1999 → May 14 1999 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Computer Networks and Communications