Performance is considered a primary criterion when it comes to RESTful web services in an application. This chapter will focus mainly on how we can improve the performance in our application and reduce the response time. Though performance optimization techniques can be applied in different layers of web applications, we will talk about the RESTful (web) layer. The remaining performance optimization techniques will be discussed in Chapter 11, Scaling.
The following topics will be discussed in this chapter:
- HTTP compression
- HTTP caching and HTTP cache control
- Cache implementation in the REST API
- Using HTTP If-Modified-Since headers and ETags
