Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Google, Amazon, and Yahoo! point enterprise developers towards "lightweight" architecture

January 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Google, Amazon, and Yahoo! point enterprise developers towards "lightweight" architecture

TAGS: Applications

ActiveGrid CEO Peter Yared has been very vocal in his views about Java's fossilized ways. We've invited Peter to write a series of pieces making the case for lightweight architecture.

Google, Amazon, and Yahoo! point enterprise developers towards "lightweight" architecture
Quite a few folks are beginnning to realize that most big websites, including Yahoo!, Google and Amazon.com, run on lightweight architecture. To define lightweight architecture, it is helpful to define its opposite:

Heavyweight architecture means you are running complicated infrastructure software like J2EE with complicated API's on a small cluster of expensive SMP machines.

Lightweight architecture means you are running straightforward, usually open source, software stacks with service oriented API's on large clusters of commodity machines.

There are four common ways of achieving a lightweight architecture. Three of them are open source solutions, and the fourth is Microsoft's attempt:

1. LAMP
As many of you know LAMP is my favorite lightweight stack. LAMP runs a vast majority of the massively scalable websites out there, and is also the favorite deployment stack for most of the "Web 2.0" crowd, including Friendster, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr. Both IBM and Oracle announced support for PHP in 2005, and there has been an upswing in enterprise adoption of the LAMP stack.

2. Open Source Java
A lot of Java developers are moving away from full blown J2EE to lightweight Java, which includes Tomcat, Spring, and Hibernate, among other open source Java projects. There are some big websites running this architecture, including E*TRADE and EBay. Lightweight Java is built on open source projects, which are a very different set of Java APIs than J2EE and are not officially sanctioned by Sun or the JCP.

3. Ruby on Rails
RoR has gotten quite a bit of traction with the intelligentsia but none yet from enterprise customers or massively scalable websites. They only just shipped version 1.0 of the Rails framework in December and some people are complaining because it is a code generator. However, it is a cool scripting language, a nice framework and a nice addition to the lightweight trend.

4. Skinny .Net
Companies like JetBlue and Charles Schwab are starting to make very selective use of .Net so that it is more lightweight. Windows was always meant to run on commodity machines, but it is challenging to get it to run on large clusters or grids of commodity machines. On the other hand, .Net offers the best tools in the business and great XML support.

Each of these four approaches differs from the other, but they are remarkably consistent when contrasted with the old way of doing things. Clearly lightweight architecture is building in momentum and helps you do some very big things that can't be accomplished with older technology!

Peter Yared can be reached via email pyared@activegrid.com

NOTE:
Are you an open source bigshot interested in guest posting on Open Resource? Email us openresource at infoworld dot com

Posted by Dave Rosenberg on January 18, 2006 09:43 PM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: