For the past day or two I had been struggling at work to figure out why Internet Explore 7 would not pay attention to the response headers stating not to cache the response. First, I tried setting the date header to expire instantly, with a value of -1. QA confirmed that this solved the problem in some revisions of IE 7 but not all. After digging around the web it turns out that you have to set a few more headers, one of which I had never even heard of. Here’s what solved the problem for me. This snippet is in Java but could apply to any language:

response.setDateHeader( "Expires", -1 );
response.setHeader( "Cache-Control", "private" );
response.setHeader( "Last-Modified", new Date().toString() );
response.setHeader( "Pragma", "no-cache" );
response.setHeader( "Cache-Control", "no-store,
                                 no-cache, must-revalidate" );

As well as using MooTools for validation, I am also using it for effects. Its nice to the the error boxes fade in and out. I think its just one of those touches that people appreciate (whether they really call it out or not). Anyway, MooTools makes it really easy as you can tell by this code.

function showErrorMessage() {
    exampleFx = new Fx.Style(’error-message’, ‘opacity’, {
    duration: 500,
    transition: Fx.Transitions.quartInOut
    });

    exampleFx.start(0,1); /*fade it in*/
}

Let me start by saying, I dont like Javascript but I love MooTools. Its not that I dont think Javascript is great and highly powerful, I just hate dealing with it especially when my job is the backend. I would do anything for a stacktrace like there is in Java!

Anywho, MooTools is a Javascript framework developed by a fellow coworker at CNET. Much like Prototype, Dojo, Scriptaculous and others it offers and extensible and extendable framework on which to build upon. I will cover more of my toilings when I have the time. I would highly recommend looking into it even if you have already used other frameworks. Here is a link to the MooTools site.