How can I force clients to refresh JavaScript files?

Question

We are currently working in a private beta and so are still in the process of making fairly rapid changes, although obviously as usage is starting to ramp up, we will be slo

Answer 1

If you're generating the page that links to the JS files a simple solution is appending the file's last modification timestamp to the generated links.

This is very similar to Huppie's answer, but works in version control systems without keyword substitution. It's also better than append the current time, since that would prevent caching even when the file didn't change at all.