I’m working on a plugin to will retrieve data from a remote server and display it on the Dashboard. To do this, I’ll be using the WordPress HTTP API but I’m not seeing any information on the HTTP API using any form of caching. As I don’t want my plugin to cause problems for the admins of the remote server, I was wondering if I missed some documentation about the HTTP API doing caching or if I’ll also need to use the Transients API to implement caching for my plugin?
Does WordPress’s HTTP API use any caching?
It does not. Some functionality actively uses HTTP API and is cached – feed fetching, updates checking. But caching is always implemented at wrapper’s level.
Making HTTP request without context is too unspecific to make educated guess about caching needs (one minute or one hour).
Since I want to easily review the http returns together with the logfiles I log them in a request database. during development handy since i have a second database that stores the metadata of the physical cache. so when i delete that one (over and over again). I can keep on doing requests from the request database and will not bother external servers time and time again. It also lets me do some specific queries on it.
http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/wp-favicons/trunk/plugins/cache/request_cache.php
called from http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/wp-favicons/trunk/includes/class-http.php
It has a couple of thousands requests in it which I find easier scrolling through in its own database. But in my case my data (favicons) are pretty static versus e.g. rss feeds where this would be a nogo.
For what i Know, the transient API should do the trick.