Building Scalable Web Sites

Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications

Larger Cover

Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications

By Cal Henderson

Publisher: O'Reilly Media

Released: May 2006

Pages: 352

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.

Chapter 1 Introduction
1. What Is a Web Application?
2. How Do You Build Web Applications?
3. What Is Architecture?
4. How Do I Get Started?
Chapter 2 Web Application Architecture
1. Layered Software Architecture
2. Layered Technologies
3. Software Interface Design
4. Getting from A to B
5. The Software/Hardware Divide
6. Hardware Platforms
7. Hardware Platform Growth
8. Hardware Redundancy
9. Networking
10. Languages, Technologies, and Databases
Chapter 3 Development Environments
1. The Three Rules
2. Use Source Control
3. One-Step Build
4. Issue Tracking
5. Scaling the Development Model
6. Coding Standards
7. Testing
Chapter 4 i18n, L10n, and Unicode
1. Internationalization and Localization
2. Unicode in a Nutshell
3. Unicode Encodings
4. The UTF-8 Encoding
5. UTF-8 Web Applications
6. Using UTF-8 with PHP
7. Using UTF-8 with Other Languages
8. Using UTF-8 with MySQL
9. Using UTF-8 with Email
10. Using UTF-8 with JavaScript
11. Using UTF-8 with APIs
Chapter 5 Data Integrity and Security
1. Data Integrity Policies
2. Good, Valid, and Invalid
3. Filtering UTF-8
4. Filtering Control Characters
5. Filtering HTML
6. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
7. SQL Injection Attacks
Chapter 6 Email
1. Receiving Email
2. Injecting Email into Your Application
3. The MIME Format
4. Parsing Simple MIME Emails
5. Parsing UU Encoded Attachments
6. TNEF Attachments
7. Wireless Carriers Hate You
8. Character Sets and Encodings
9. Recognizing Your Users
10. Unit Testing
Chapter 7 Remote Services
1. Remote Services Club
2. Sockets
3. Using HTTP
4. Remote Services Redundancy
5. Asynchronous Systems
6. Exchanging XML
7. Lightweight Protocols
Chapter 8 Bottlenecks
1. Identifying Bottlenecks
2. External Services and Black Boxes
Chapter 9 Scaling Web Applications
1. The Scaling Myth
2. Scaling the Network
3. Load Balancing
4. Scaling MySQL
5. MyISAM
6. MySQL Replication
7. Database Partitioning
8. Scaling Large Database
9. Scaling Storage
Chapter 10 Statistics, Monitoring, and Alerting
1. Tracking Web Statistics
2. Application Monitoring
3. Alerting
Chapter 11 APIs
1. Data Feeds
2. Mobile Content
3. Web Services
4. API Transports
5. API Abuse
6. Authentication
7. The Future

Colophon

Title:

Building Scalable Web Sites

By:

Cal Henderson

Publisher:

O'Reilly Media

Formats:

Print
Ebook
Safari Books Online

Print:

May 2006

Ebook:

December 2008

Pages:

352

Print ISBN:

978-0-596-10235-7

| ISBN 10:

0-596-10235-6

Ebook ISBN:

978-0-596-15947-4

| ISBN 10:

0-596-15947-1

Colophon

The animal on the cover of Building Scalable Web Sites is a carp (Cyprinus carpio). The carp is a fish whose reputation varies greatly depending on who you ask. In some countries, such as Taiwan and Japan, the carp is generally regarded as a sign of good fortune. Carp are bred for their beautiful colors and are featured prominently in Japanese gardens. Carp also enjoy a special place in Japanese art-painters have often used the fish to symbolize persistence, longevity, and fertility.

In other parts of the world, the carp is seen as a nuisance and has become a target for removal. In the United States, for example, carp are sometimes poisoned so that different fish can be introduced. However, the carp's ability to adapt and even thrive in the harshest of conditions have made such extermination efforts difficult. In Australia, the carp has an even worse reputation. Studies have shown that carp, which are not indigenous and were introduced illegally to the continent, are destructive to Australian ecologies. As a result, strict laws have been put into place-for example, if you catch a carp while fishing, it is illegal to return it to the water.

The carp's reputation as a food also varies depending on where you are. Carp is routinely served in many Asian countries, such as China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. In some Eastern European countries, carp is served on special occasions and is a traditional Christmas Eve meal. In North America, on the other hand, carp is largely considered to be too boney and fishy tasting for eating.

Even the carp's status as a game fish varies from place to place. Among the toughest fighting freshwater fish, the carp would seem to be the ideal challenge for anglers all over the world. However, in the U.S., the carp is not considered to be a top game fish, although that is beginning to change. But Europeans take carp fishing much more seriously, and top anglers come together for competitions all over Europe.

The cover image is from Cassell's Natural History. The cover font is Adobe ITC Garamond. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed.

Description

Table of Contents

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Customer Reviews

REVIEW SNAPSHOT®

by PowerReviews

oreilly Building Scalable Web Sites

4.0

(based on 4 reviews)

Reviews

Reviewed by 4 customers

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Displaying reviews 1-4

10/7/2010

(1 of 2 customers found this review helpful)

2.0

It is not interesting at all

By dmarsentev

from Moscow, Russia

About Me Developer, Educator

Pros

Easy to understand

Cons

Too basic

Best Uses

Novice

Comments about oreilly Building Scalable Web Sites:

I found a lot of evident simple sentences in this book, but I expected to find detailed technical explanations how to succeed in scalability.

I expected to find a lot of tools and methods in this book, but I found just common words.
Yes, there are good and right words, but almost all of them are evident or out of date.

If you have some experience in web development and if you read good blogs, forums and so on, you can painlessly skip this book.

5/5/2009

(1 of 2 customers found this review helpful)

5.0

Awesome

By Chris

from Undisclosed

Comments about oreilly Building Scalable Web Sites:

This book should be standard issue for anyone getting into web development, or anyone who has been in it for years. Cal runs you through many practical and realistic solutions to almost every problem you'll experience as your site grows, and helps you see the bigger picture when approaching any new project.

It is also a fairly easy read... he doesn't throw technical terms at you without first explaining what they mean, and he is not condescending but rather humble when explaining his own experiences and is eager to expose his thought process as well.

This book will empower you to be a better developer and brings back the excitement you felt when you had your very first "Hello World" program up and running.

7/27/2008

5.0

A must read for those in the web space

By Bill D

from Undisclosed

Comments about oreilly Building Scalable Web Sites:

When I first started reading this book I had certain expectations about the technical level of the content. I was expecting to have a lot of information about webservers, and load balancers, an d database clusters, and maybe software architecture.

I was pleasantly surprised as it covers all those things and more.

First as I've done in several of my reviews let me list the chapter titles.

1. Introduction

2. Web Application Architecture

3. Development Environments

4. i18n, l10n, and Unicode

5. Data Integrity and Security

6. Email

7. Remote Services

8. Bottlenecks

9. Scaling Web Applications

10. Statistics, Monitoring, and Alerting

11. APIs

I would recommend this book to any Web 1.0,2.0,3.0 startup trying to get ready to write their first line of code, well before that even.

Chapter three will be a review to many who read it, assuming they have good software engineering practices. Use revision control, use bug tracking, have a simple and repeatable build. This is really a good chapter which really applies to any kind of software you might write.

A general statement about this book, in numerous places where there are multiple options for tools to use, some free, some which cost real money, the author makes a list of the popular alternatives, gives pros and cons and a ball park for cost.

Chapter four, well if you don't know anything about internationalization (i18n), localization(l10n) and/or unicode, this chapter will resolve that problem. These efforts can introduce complexity into your system, and this chapter and frankly many place later in the book continue to point out the issues which can come up when dealing with not ascii characters.

Well I could write a chapter about each chapter, but then you wouldn't buy the book, which you should if you want to know about the topic.

I may even read it a second time.

3/24/2008

4.0

Ready, Set, Scale!

By joshSVUG

from Undisclosed

Comments about oreilly Building Scalable Web Sites:

I found the book very informative and for the most part easy to read. The book can be used as a compass for building large scalable LAMP web sites but it shouldn't be regarded as gospel.

The book is a fine foundation but if you poke around you may find other "best practices". One example, the section discussing "Mitigating SQL Injection Attacks" one can argue against granting the delete privilege to the application user. If the application user can't delete, use a logical/soft delete by setting a flag on the records to be deleted, this way you also gain an "undelete" option. To physically purge the data, have a separate user/cron job that does so (segregation of duties).

The one odd thing I found is that it feels as if the book can't decide if it's a tutorial (bug tracking/source control) or chronicles of the "Flicker Way" (processing email from mobile devices).

All in all, a book to own.

Displaying reviews 1-4

Save a Tree - Go Digital what is this?

Ebook: $31.99

Formats: DAISY, ePub, Mobi, PDF

Print & Ebook: $43.99

Print: $39.99

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Chapter 1 Introduction

What Is a Web Application?

How Do You Build Web Applications?

What Is Architecture?

How Do I Get Started?

Chapter 2 Web Application Architecture

Layered Software Architecture

Layered Technologies

Software Interface Design

Getting from A to B

The Software/Hardware Divide

Hardware Platforms

Hardware Platform Growth

Hardware Redundancy

Networking

Languages, Technologies, and Databases

Chapter 3 Development Environments

The Three Rules

Use Source Control

One-Step Build

Issue Tracking

Scaling the Development Model

Coding Standards

Testing

Chapter 4 i18n, L10n, and Unicode

Internationalization and Localization

Unicode in a Nutshell

Unicode Encodings

The UTF-8 Encoding

UTF-8 Web Applications

Using UTF-8 with PHP

Using UTF-8 with Other Languages

Using UTF-8 with MySQL

Using UTF-8 with Email

Using UTF-8 with JavaScript

Using UTF-8 with APIs

Chapter 5 Data Integrity and Security

Data Integrity Policies

Good, Valid, and Invalid

Filtering UTF-8

Filtering Control Characters

Filtering HTML

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

SQL Injection Attacks

Chapter 6 Email

Receiving Email

Injecting Email into Your Application

The MIME Format

Parsing Simple MIME Emails

Parsing UU Encoded Attachments

TNEF Attachments

Wireless Carriers Hate You

Character Sets and Encodings

Recognizing Your Users

Unit Testing

Chapter 7 Remote Services

Remote Services Club

Sockets

Using HTTP

Remote Services Redundancy

Asynchronous Systems

Exchanging XML

Lightweight Protocols

Chapter 8 Bottlenecks

Identifying Bottlenecks

External Services and Black Boxes

Chapter 9 Scaling Web Applications

The Scaling Myth

Scaling the Network

Load Balancing

Scaling MySQL

MyISAM

MySQL Replication

Database Partitioning

Scaling Large Database

Scaling Storage

Chapter 10 Statistics, Monitoring, and Alerting

Tracking Web Statistics

Application Monitoring

Alerting