iOS Web App - how to deal with overzealous app caching?

Question

I\'ve been developing a pretty complicated HTML5 web app for the past month. Last night my iPhone suddenly decided to cache all JS, CSS, and images an

Answer 1

For what it's worth, and it's not a perfect solution, we had to settle with appending query strings. I've written a shell script to make this and a few other tasks bit more automated, you can look at the source on GitHub. A few details:

• It's designed for JS but can easily be edited to handle CSS too.
• It takes all files listed in script_order.txt and compiles them with Google's Closure Compiler
• Groups them into chunks under 25kb when possible (iPhone won't cache anything over 25kb pre-gzip, although apparently this extends only to browsers and not standalone webapps)
• Outputs a PHP file with <script> tags that have a ?v=timestamp appended to the script filenames. If you're working with static HTML and can't include a PHP file, you could rewrite the output to append the script tags to your index.html file.

Another pretty hacky solution would be to save your JS/CSS with a .php file extension, and in those files set the headers to something like this:

<?php
header("content-type: application/javascript");
header('Cache-Control: no-cache');
header('Pragma: no-cache');
?>
window.alert('hello world');

EDIT:

Setting the date to 2, 3 or 4 days in the future, start the app from homescreen and then set the date back to normal also can do the trick.