title: Is there a better solution for caching than MD5 Fingerprinting?
body: <p>I understand the easyness of comparing the automatically generated MD5 fingerprint in order to determine if a file has or hasn't been changed.</p>
  
  <p>My question is: <strong>is MD5 Fingerprint the only approach to caching?</strong></p>
  
  <p>I supposed not, I know I've been able to cache both in the Client and in the Server without using MD5 fingerprinting.</p>
  
  <p>So, depending on the answer: <strong>Why would I use MD5 fingerprint if I can achieve the same thing without using it?</strong> Why add complexity?</p>
  
  <p><em>Why am I asking that?</em></p>
  
  <p>I'm using Gulp as a replacement for the Rails Asset Pipeline and having a hard time to make Rails use the newly generated manifest.json.</p>
  
  <p>The workflow is perfect (gulp-unccs, gulp-livereload, gulp-jshint and whatnot) and I love it (much faster) but I'm not sure as to why (if?) I need to do the MD5 Fingerprinting.</p>