BoSStats, FlightFeather and the Relative Static Web

There are lots of reasons not to use a database for a web application. Sometimes a server's security profile rules out installing another daemon. Sometimes simplicity of administration is more important than query language. This toolkit gives you database-like features with a reduced software install

By George Belotsky, LinuxWorld.com, 01/29/07

 Start a discussion    Print article

 Comments (1)    Print article

The World Wide Web started out as a collection of static pages linked to one another. Of course, this was not enough for long. Today (especially with the arrival of Web 2.0) is the era of the Web application. While static pages still abound, the most popular -- and the most exciting -- sites are dynamic.

The typical dynamic site depends heavily on a relational database backend (although the most visited sites do not necessarily use this approach). The application builds pages by querying the database, and assembling the returned data into HTML documents. This is a complex process, often implemented in several software layers (N-tier architecture). The database, in particular, must be very robust. After all, the system's state lives there. If the database goes down (or worse, becomes corrupted) the entire site can no longer function.

Very often, expensive hardware (frequently coupled with expensive software) and teams of database administrators must nurse the database. This scenario is common -- even in systems where the rest of the application runs on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) with generic hardware.

There are tools to help developers of dynamic sites deal with the resulting scalability problems. For example, you could use memcached -- a distributed in-memory cache -- as part of your application. This can greatly reduce the strain on the database. Caching proxies such as Squid ease the load on multiple layers of the system. Adding Squid to a live site may even compensate for some errors in design or implementation, allowing the application to perform sufficiently well with little change.

Yet, the standard architecture for dynamic sites may be less effective than its popularity suggests. First of all, the ubiquitous relational database management system (RDBMS) is not the best tool for text processing (see "One Size Fits All? -- Part 2: Benchmarking Results" (PDF)). Programming for the Web, of course, is still primarily about text processing. Google does not use an RDBMS for this purpose, nor did the earlier search engines (such as Lycos and Inktomi).

Featured Whitepapers

About Us | Contact Us | Advertising Info | Terms of Service/Privacy

Copyright, 2006-2007 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.