[Tilecache] http 304 Not Modifies responses ?

[Attila Csipa]

I've been looking at ways of improving the speed of the web mapping projects 
I'm in and that's how I ran accross TileCache. While it works pretty smoothly 
after a quick glance at the source it occured to me that it does not support 
any client side caching (with the help of f.e. 304 Not Modified responses). I 
made a patch that does the job (inserts Last-Modified and ETag headers based 
on the date and content of the generated tile and responds with a 304 if the 
header comes back for a reload of a tile it already has), but I'm not sure 
how the general public feels about this or if it's worth putting back in the 
trunk. Some clients (like openlayers) for some reason do not provide the 
If-Newer-Than headers with their requests so that would need a bit of 
investigation, bit first I'd like to hear what people here think about this 
sort of approach (or a pointer where maybe this has been discussed 
previously) or whom I should talk to about submitting patches.