Another great publication from ISV Engineering in the Sun Blueprints™ series. This time, Amanda Waite & Marina Fisher explain the "rest of the story" that goes beyond the explicit features & functions of an application. Their article, called Addressing Systemic Qualities in SAMP Architectures, lays out the details of what developers using a SAMP (Solaris, Apache, MySQL, PhP) need to consider when delivering a complete application that meets both user and administrator expectations. Here are some of these systemic issues that they detail:
- Performance — how long it takes to execute aset of particular actions. Users expect a snappy response from Web-based applications. Prolonged waits for page loads can ultimately lead to user discontent, which can cause users to migrate to competitive sites.
- Scalability — refers to the ability to accommodate greater workloads and larger user populations. Today it is not uncommon for a site to experience sudden, massive peaks in the number of page accesses due to a mention on popular blogs or social networking sites such as Digg or Slashdot.org.
- Availablity — a measure of a user’s ability to access an application or service. Designing for high availability generally means protecting against unplanned system downtime. In addition, application data must be protected and is also subject to requirements for consistency and integrity.
- Extensibility — how quickly new features can be added to an application service and made available to users. The ability to extend the functionality of an application in response to user demand can provide significant competitive advantage.
- Interoperability — defines how well an application works with other applications. Web 2.0 applications frequently offer services to other applications through APIs. While most APIs are built on top of interoperability standards, these standards often exist only to define the syntax of inter-application communications.
- Security — A Web site must be protected from attacks that intend to compromise the site’s ability to service its users. At a minimum, applications must be designed to protect against common attacks such as Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks.
Stefan Schneider also talks about this blueprint here and suggests developers to post questions about how to implement the suggestions.
