As the Web becomes an intrinsic part of the economy and our everyday lives,
the success and survival of many businesses increasingly depend on the
availability and accessibility of their core Web applications. Although a
high degree of scalability and reliability can be achieved through the right
combination of local and global redundancy, load balancing and sound
application design, many companies turn to Content Delivery Networks or CDNs
such as Akamai or Speedera. This article recounts experiences and lessons
learned from developing an information portal that serves millions of users
and leverages Akamai's CDN.
How CDN WorksTypically CDN providers augment the traditional Web
infrastructure shown in Figure 1-a by introducing thousands of edge servers
usually located ... (more)
The Web transcends national boundaries and many sites reach global audiences,
which brings into the spotlight the problem of internationalization of Web
applications. The Java community has an established approach for supporting
multilingual applications through resources stored in ResourceBundle, which
works well in examples but has many shortcomings when applied to real world
problems.... (more)
Current Web applications, especially portals, have become increasingly
content driven. It led to development of a plethora of sophisticated and
powerful Web Content Management Systems, or WCMS. They help to automate
creation, management, reviewing, tagging, rendering, publication,
maintenance, and deprecation of Web content. Usually, these systems support a
wide variety of content types ... (more)
In the five years that I have worked in Web solutions practices, a typical
business problem has changed from "we need a new Web site" to "we need to
regain control over our existing sites." It's not uncommon for large
corporations to have hundreds or even thousands of different Web sites spread
over various service lines, geographies, and organizational boundaries. This
presents challeng... (more)
The latest trend in information portals and Web applications has been to
build complex Web pages. To present large amounts of information and
functionality without compromising usability, designers have imposed a clear
structure by grouping related elements together. Such cohesive, visually
distinct constructs, or compartments, often with their own presentation
logic, have become an esse... (more)
Alex works at Sun Microsystems as the Engineering Manager for Sun SOA Governance Solution. For nearly two decades he architected and built distributed systems on enterprise, national and global scale. Alex specializes in SOA Infrastructure, Security and Composite Applications. He blogs at http://blogs.sun.com/RealSOA/ and can be contacted at maclinovsky@yahoo.com
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