Balancing the Question of Scale
To elegantly deliver Web applications to new and different users, such as phone and PDA, an open, standards-based approach is best
By Geoff Koch
April 1, 2005 —
(Page 1 of 8)
Coursework.stanford.edu had humble enough beginnings in the late 1990s.
“It started as a research project, and I was the only developer working on it,” said Scott Stocker, a former history master’s student who today is director of Web communications at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
Currently, the course management Web application is used by roughly 600 professors each quarter to post assignments, foster online discussion and administer quizzes. Stocker, who has long since moved on and up the Stanford IT hierarchy, left behind a full-time staff of four to manage the application he built from scratch.
Managing application scaling, whether on a single university server or a massively parallel and distributed commercial system, is a challenge that just about every coder will encounter at some point in a career. And mobility only compounds the scaling issue, as new phone- and PDA-powered users begin banging on Web applications designed for desktop and laptop browsers.
From academia to industry, hands-on coders are using a handful of best practices to address an explosion of scaling issues. While tools are available to help, an eat-your-vegetables kind of common sense seems to be the first step toward elegantly offering Web applications to new and different types of users.
Scaling at Stanford
Stocker’s users were professors who, despite having impressive resumes and jobs at tech-steeped Stanford, had varying degrees of Web competency. The application had to be flexible (to be useful both to the Web pros and novices on the faculty), robust (if it crashed or was buggy, no one would use it), and inexpensive (Stocker was a staff of one, funded by a small grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation to develop new learning management tools).
The approach, as is fairly common in academia, was to get the ball rolling with open standards and open source. Stocker built on top of the Linux operating system and MySQL database. Even though it was a pre-J2EE world, Stocker was already hooked on Java and relied heavily on servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSPs).
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