Calder Group Inc

I enjoy blogging, but I often talk about little tech and process tidbits that interest me. This week I’m in Seattle, and I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a lot of folks starting online businesses, building online businesses and running online businesses.

The interesting thing in Seattle is its a Microsoft town, yet all most all of the business managers and founders of new online companies want tech people skilled in Open Source and Linux. This desire is driven by the feeling that open source is faster, more flexible, and more on the cutting edge. I agree with that, but I also see a lot of bloat, and too many tech choices to make. Just think of how may Java XML parsers there are ( Jibx, PPP, JBO).

The problem is lots of opinions about better technology are throw out there, with no backdrop for comparison. Often technologies are discussed and evaluated for their unique or expressed purpose, but they need to be evaluated for how they fit into the overall stack of software.

At a 10,000 foot view a basic web app has three parts
Data - some structured information
Presentation - some web application to display the data
Manipulation - some apps to manipulate or personalize the data

This is a basic web app, which should cover more than 90% of all the sites out there. This breakdown isn’t going to describe everything, but lets save something for part 2 & 3.

The simplest representation of this is a flat HTML page.
Presentation - the HTML page and an Apache server
Manipulation - the tool would be a text editor like vi
Data - the file system.

A more complex system would have capabilities like user generated content, search, administration tools, meta data, co-branded pages, and ad delivery. I’ll admit not every app falls cleanly into my three over generalized buckets, but this is just a basic web architecture which should describe almost all the sites out there.

Presentation
——————-
Search
Co-brands
Feeds
Google Maps
Ad Delivery
Reading Blogs

Manipulation
——————–
Editorial Tools
User Facing Tools
Writing Blogs

Data
———
Databases
File systems
In Memory Caches

Things that don’t fit in well are integrated APIs, where reading and writing are done via the same interface. The same application may handle both, and separating the two functions would be silly.

Messaging platforms (ie JMS) don’t really fit in either.

Like I said before, this isn’t an attempt to describe all web architectures, just a the most basic variety.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 2:47 pm and is filed under The Web, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.