Subrequests is a request aggregator project that will allow you to turn multiple requests into a single one. To do so client-side applications describe the requests they want to do in a JSON document and send that document to the server. In turn, the server interprets that document, called blueprint, and executes all the those requests in the clients behalf.
There are two big benefits when using this approach:
- There is only one round trip between server an client. The client to server communications may be weak (ex: over 3G), but the server to server communications are always very reliable.
- If your requests are resolved by the same server processing the blueprints, you eliminate completaly the latency introduced by sequential requests. That introduces a dramatic performance improvement.
Subrequests is implemented as a Drupal module
and as an express middleware.
ContentaJS relies on the nodejs implementation of the
Subrequests specification,
which is exposed in the /subrequests route.
If you want to learn more about how your client side applications can use subrequests to reduce communications latency and improve application performance read this article or watch this presentation.