[colevscode]

Hi, I worked on this at Squarespace.

> Why would a developer want to see a cached version of a page?

Squarespace is a CMS. There's an online content editor where users can add text and images. The content is rendered using a template which contains the HTML/CSS/Template code that defines the layout for the content. The squarespace dev server makes it easier for the developer to work on the template code using content from the live site. I don't think you'd run into a situation where it looked fine locally but broke in production, because the content will be the same.

> why not just make it a portable executable for each platform

NPM has great cross-platform support, and it's used by lots of web developers. That's why we chose NPM. It allowed us to build a cross-platform tool without having to maintain lots of separate installers for various platforms.

Also we wanted to take advantage of the same java based template and less compilers that we use in production (that are open source), which is a large part of why we used java. I'll admit it's not a natural choice for an NPM package, but it's working well for us so far.

[danpalmer]

That's a really strange choice, to distribute Java via NPM. Can you go into a bit more detail on the reasons?

[smpetrey]

Seems cool man! But why not give the dev the option to turn off caching?

[artosispylon]

"If you need to invalidate the cache (because you’ve updated your website in the online editor, for example) you can use the ?nocache=true query parameter on any URL."