Challenges and practices in deploying web acceleration solutions for distributed enterprise systems

Abstract

For most Web-based applications, contents are created dynamically based on the current state of a business, such as product prices and inventory, stored in database systems. These applications demand personalized content and track user behavior while maintaining application integrity. Many of such practices are not compatible with Web acceleration solutions. Consequently, although many web acceleration solutions have shown promising performance improvement and scalability, architecting and engineering distributed enterprise Web applications to utilize available content delivery networks remain a challenge. In this paper, we examine the challenge to accelerate J2EE-based enterprise web applications. We list obstacles and recommend some practices to transform typical database-driven J2EE applications to cache friendly Web applications where Web acceleration solutions can be applied. Furthermore, such transformation should be done without modification to the underlying application business logic and without sacrificing functions that are essential to e-commerce. We take the J2EE reference software, the Java PetStore, as a case study. By using the proposed guideline, we are able to cache more than 90% of the content in the PetStore and scale up the Web site more than 20 times.

A survey on dynamic Web content generation and delivery techniques

“…Although the system is build for declarative dataintensive Web sites, the caching policies and the approach to optimize performance apply to most Web applications with MVC architecture and XML/XSLT views. Another dynamic content caching and invalidation framework ''CachePortalI'' for accelerating database-driven Web application is proposed in Li et al (2004). The suggested technology enables the dynamic content caching by automatically deriving the relationship between cached pages and database contents (i.e., URL and query mapping), and intelligently monitoring database changes to ''eject'' stale pages from caches.…”

“…And ESI for Java provides extensions to Java that make it easy to program JSPs using ESI. ''CachePortalII'' (Li et al, 2004), Weave System (Yagoub et al, 2000), and ''query caching'' are other examples of programmatic approach. WebSphere Edge Server (IBM Corp,) and Akamai EdgeComputing Server (Akamai Technologies Inc,) both require developer to partition the origin and edge components and declare them while deploying applications.…”

A reference software architecture for the development of industrial automation high-level applications in the petroleum industry

“…The benefits of using this technology are well documented. See, for example [27][28][29][30][31][32][33]. 2.…”

Large-Scale ASP Replication of Database-Driven Portals

“…That is, the content they provide to the user is generated on demand in response to user requests. These applications usually have two components: (1) front-end business logic that interacts with the user and provides the portal's look and feel and (2) a back-end database or databases containing the portal's true content Li, Hsiung, Po, Hino, Candan, & Agrawal, 2004b;Vallamsetty, Kant, & Mohapatra, 2002). Based on user requests the frontend logic queries the back-end databases, obtains needed content, and then uses that content to build a page (or other result) which is returned to the user.…”