Reading resources over the web is always a challenging process in terms of time and network latency. As a result, when you build a web application or web service, the ability to cache and reuse previously retrieved resources is a critical aspect of optimizing for performance. The HTTP/1.1 protocol specification provides a number of features to facilitate the caching of network resources.

In this section, we will discuss the native support in the HTTP protocol for managing the cache of the resources retrieved from the server. Similarly, we will see how the JAX-RS framework APIs embrace the HTTP caching features for managing the cache of the results returned by the RESTful web services.