mca blog

Jim Webber just posted an very interesting review of his experience working up a web solution for a telecomms company.

My (small) team spent a couple of weeks working through some analysis of the problem, including some simple mathematical models of how the problem domain scales over time, and how the solution would have to compensate. We took the time to understand how to incrementally alter the enterprise architecture to release value early, and we proposed doing this using commodity HTTP servers at £0 cost for middleware. Importantly we backed up our architectural approach with numbers: we measured the throughput and latency characteristics of a representative spike (a piece of code used to answer a question) through our high level design, and showed that both HTTP and our chosen Web server were suitable for the volumes of traffic that the system would have to support.

again the point comes through that HTTP servers are middleware themselves. and, when properly implemented, HTTP servers are very lightweight, scalable, and agile middleware.