mca blog

i posted a new SDS demo this weekend. it's a small one, but fun.

my focus on this demo was to exercise the features of SDS that make it possible to host binary files. so i built a site that hosts about 200 photos (plus another 400 thumbnail and preview files). it also holds javascript, stylesheets, and source code files for online use. all pretty cool - and simple.

one of my goals was to reduce the number of files that must be hosted locally (with my own web server). to that end, the only files hosted locally for this demo are an XSLT file, a C# DLL and the web.config file. so all the images, scripts, stylsheets, and even view-able source code files are all in SDS. and i kinda like it that way. it's easy to update the files to SDS and then call them directly from my web app.

in fact, hosting these files on the web makes it really easy to test out a version of the web server on my local workstation, too. i can rebuild my DLL and/or modify my XSL transform and then run it right there. it can reach SDS to pull the rest of the files just fine. once debugging is done, i upgrade the production box by copying just the DLL and XSLT file. really simple. really fast.

next i'll concentrate on the second reason i built the demo - to show that using an anonymous proxy in front of SDS authenticated servers does not automatically mean you get slow performance. even in cases where the app does mostly binary file services (like this photo demo). and it worked out pretty well on that front, too. but that will have to wait for another post.