The future of OpenSource and OpenStandards in the UK (by Richard Harvey)

My friend just published his view on OpenSource in the UK. Very interesting piece of article!

The future of OpenSource and OpenStandards in the UK.

Scalability of Web Servers with AJAX and GWT

Abstract

The community of web developers has warmly welcomed AJAX-like technologies but has so far treated them as an “eye-candy”, a magic recipe to make web applications look pretty. The author believes that AJAX, and especially Google Web Toolkit, can bring benefits to the back-end of the web infrastructure as much as to the front-end.
Keeping the session-state on the client is the secret to achieve higher scalability by decoupling Clients and Servers and providing instantaneous fault tolerance at no extra cost.

Introduction

The growth that The Internet as has in the last years has changed the expectation in terms of number of users that a web infrastructures is required to serve. A web server infrastructure might nowadays need to be able to cope with millions of users.
Whenever it is possible to foresee such a high demand of connections, it is important to make sure that the system we work with is able to expand in order to easily accommodate the increased load. Such ability to expand is called Scalability.

The purpose of this article is to show different ways to design a scalable system, and explore the opportunity given by the AJAX technology to facilitate Scalability by removing the need for stateful servers.

The right tool for the right task

My biggest and most recent achievement while working in my company comes from a really basic concept. Every task can be completed in a number of ways, but one tool (the right one) will make it easier!

In our complex infrastructure, the biggest bottleneck was validating data within XML Files. The files, usually representing Purchase Orders or Invoices, had to be validated against a number of simple rules.

The process that was taking care of it was extremely inefficient, and some files would take up to 40 seconds to be validated.

This article on Schematron and this on RelaxNG gave me the idea, while SUN’s MSV and ZVON’s SaxonServer gave me the tools.

Now my Java Frankenstein can munch documents at the average speed of 20ms (yes… MILLISECONDS) saving hours of processing time and integrating seamlessly in the present infrastructure.

Not bad, uhu?

Ask me how to have the same in your system.