Building Scalable Web Sites [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

"What this book gives, possibly uniquely, is both a look at the whole spectrum of building a service and some details of all the major stages. It's ideal to give to someone who has a tight focus or experience on a particular area, e.g. writing lines and lines of PHP code which kills the database or filer because the author has little appreciation of what happens at other levels of the system structure. This book would make an ideal guide to people who need to be given some indications of the world beyond a small area. It's also a good read for those who build web sites which may potentially get a large volume of traffic to learn from flickr and why they made the decisions they made." - Sam Smith, news@UK, September 2006

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.

Slow websites infuriate users. Lots of people can visit your web site or use your web application - but you have to be prepared for those visitors, or they won't come back. Your sites need to be built to withstand the problems success creates. "Building Scalable Web Sites" looks at a variety of techniques for creating sites which can keep users cheerful even when there are thousands or millions of them. Flickr.com developer, Cal Henderson, explains how to build sites so that large numbers of visitors can enjoy them. Henderson examines techniques that go beyond sheer speed, exploring how to coordinate developers, support international users, and integrate with other services from email to SOAP to RSS to the APIs exposed by many Ajax-based web applications. This book uncovers the secrets that you need to know for back-end scaling, architecture and failover so your websites can handle countless requests. You'll learn how to take the "poor man's web technologies" - Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP or other scripting languages - and scale them to compete with established "store bought" enterprise web technologies.

Toward the end of the book, you'll discover techniques for keeping web applications running with event monitoring and long-term statistical tracking for capacity planning. If you're about to build your first dynamic website, then "Building Scalable Web Sites" isn't for you. But if you're an advanced developer who's ready to realize the cost and performance benefits of a comprehensive approach to scalable applications, then let your fingers do the walking through this convenient guide.

Cal Henderson has been a web applications developer for far too long and should really start looking for a serious job. Originally from England, he currently works at Yahoo! Inc in Sunnyvale, California as the Engineering Manager for the photo-sharing service Flickr. 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.