Re:Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web a...
by kls on Friday October 23, 2009 @03:41PM
(#899482)
different apps from these companies are further along in there utilization of a decoupled architecture than others but most all are working to this end, Many of Google's "applications" completely rely on this approach, I cannot comment on their mainstay (search). But most of Google app are assembled via the browser (Gmail, Docs, Maps, Wave) Its core to their strategy, hence entering into the browser market and the rapid push for HTML 5. As for Amazon most ancillary portions of their offerings use a decoupled strategy. The last understanding that I had, was they where waiting for a concrete SEO solution before moving their main asset .com over. These are large companies with legacy code base so it is natural that this architecture is emerging in their new product offering and acquired products first and is migrating it's way back into the legacy code base. In another post I provide referential links to the subject.
I know that they are using lots of web services, but the assembly is still mostly done on their servers (not in the browser), and you're talking about something else (or have I understood you wrong?).
I've seen a talk from an Amazon fellow. They are using web services for parallel processing ... their frontend servers are sending asynchronous requests to those services, which is a huge win.
But in a browser, for an Ajax frontend that happens to periodically request updates, one thing that happens is that the number of requests made from a single client is a lot larger. Surely it doesn't reload all the static files, but those are non-issues even for a reasonable high-traffic website ... just put something like Varnish to serve them and make sure they have expiration headers in the future.
My company did consultancy work in matters of scalability for http://www.erepublik.com/ and after we placed a Varnish in front (that also functions as a load-balancer for Apache servers) it could handle thousands of concurrent requests to static files. And their biggest problem was definitely not the load on their Apache servers (it was MySql).
And this is mostly what I was thinking about.