This comprehensive guide covers the design of software and hardware systems for web applications. Using scores of examples and leading-edge tips, it details proven methods for scaling web applications to millions of users. Topics include application architecture, development practices, technologies, Unicode, and general infrastructure work. Ideal for anyone ready to realize the cost and performance benefits available to web applications today.
Learn the tricks of the trade so you can build and architect applications that scale quickly--without all the high-priced headaches and service-level agreements associated with enterprise app servers and proprietary programming and database products. Culled from the experience of the Flickr.com lead developer, Building Scalable Web Sites offers techniques for creating fast sites that your visitors will find a pleasure to use.
Creating popular sites requires much more than fast hardware with lots of memory and hard drive space. It requires thinking about how to grow over time, how to make the same resources accessible to audiences with different expectations, and how to have a team of developers work on a site without creating new problems for visitors and for each other.
Presenting information to visitors from all over the world
* Integrating email with your web applications
* Planning hardware purchases and hosting options to have as much as you need without breaking your wallet
* Partitioning and distributing databases to support large datasets and simultaneous transactions
* Monitoring your applications to find and clear bottlenecks
* Providing services APIs and using services from other providers to increase your site's reach and capabilities
Whether you're starting a small web site with hopes of growing big or you already have a large system that needs maintenance, you'll find Building Scalable Web Sites to be a library of ideas for making things work.
Cal Henderson has been a web applications developer for far too long and should really start looking for a serious job.
Originally from England, Cal is the VP of Engineering for Tiny Speck. Until recently he worked at Yahoo! Inc, as the Director of Engineering for Flickr, in San Francisco, California. He worked on Flickr from the day it started development (on his laptop) until April 2009 (when it was the "Official website of the Internet").
Before Flickr, he was the technical director of Special Web Projects at Emap, a UK media company. By night he works for a whole slew of web sites and communities, including the creative community B3TA and his personal site, iamcal. In his spare time, he writes windows software, develops web publishing tools, and writes occasional articles about web application development and security.
He promises he's working on a second edition of Building Scalable Websites.
