Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications

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.

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 that 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 web sites can handle countless requests. You'll learn how to take the "poor man's web technologies", like Linux, Apache, MySQL, 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 web site, 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.