Building Scalable Web Sites

Building Scalable Web Sites

Chapter 1. Introduction
 Section 1.1. What Is a Web Application?
 Section 1.2. How Do You Build Web Applications?
 Section 1.3. What Is Architecture?
 Section 1.4. How Do I Get Started?
Chapter 2. Web Application Architecture
 Section 2.1. Layered Software Architecture
 Section 2.2. Layered Technologies
 Section 2.3. Software Interface Design
 Section 2.4. Getting from A to B
 Section 2.5. The Software/Hardware Divide
 Section 2.6. Hardware Platforms
 Section 2.7. Hardware Platform Growth
 Section 2.8. Hardware Redundancy
 Section 2.9. Networking
 Section 2.10. Languages, Technologies, and Databases
Chapter 3. Development Environments
 Section 3.1. The Three Rules
 Section 3.2. Use Source Control
 Section 3.3. One-Step Build
 Section 3.4. Issue Tracking
 Section 3.5. Scaling the Development Model
 Section 3.6. Coding Standards
 Section 3.7. Testing
Chapter 4. i18n, L10n, and Unicode
 Section 4.1. Internationalization and Localization
 Section 4.2. Unicode in a Nutshell
 Section 4.3. Unicode Encodings
 Section 4.4. The UTF-8 Encoding
 Section 4.5. UTF-8 Web Applications
 Section 4.6. Using UTF-8 with PHP
 Section 4.7. Using UTF-8 with Other Languages
 Section 4.8. Using UTF-8 with MySQL
 Section 4.9. Using UTF-8 with Email
 Section 4.10. Using UTF-8 with JavaScript
 Section 4.11. Using UTF-8 with APIs
Chapter 5. Data Integrity and Security
 Section 5.1. Data Integrity Policies
 Section 5.2. Good, Valid, and Invalid
 Section 5.3. Filtering UTF-8
 Section 5.4. Filtering Control Characters
 Section 5.5. Filtering HTML
 Section 5.6. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
 Section 5.7. SQL Injection Attacks
Chapter 6. Email
 Section 6.1. Receiving Email
 Section 6.2. Injecting Email into Your Application
 Section 6.3. The MIME Format
 Section 6.4. Parsing Simple MIME Emails
 Section 6.5. Parsing UU Encoded Attachments
 Section 6.6. TNEF Attachments
 Section 6.7. Wireless Carriers Hate You
 Section 6.8. Character Sets and Encodings
 Section 6.9. Recognizing Your Users
 Section 6.10. Unit Testing
Chapter 7. Remote Services
 Section 7.1. Remote Services Club
 Section 7.2. Sockets
 Section 7.3. Using HTTP
 Section 7.4. Remote Services Redundancy
 Section 7.5. Asynchronous Systems
 Section 7.6. Exchanging XML
 Section 7.7. Lightweight Protocols
Chapter 8. Bottlenecks
 Section 8.1. Identifying Bottlenecks
 Section 8.2. External Services and Black Boxes
Chapter 9. Scaling Web Applications
 Section 9.1. The Scaling Myth
 Section 9.2. Scaling the Network
 Section 9.3. Load Balancing
 Section 9.4. Scaling MySQL
 Section 9.5. MyISAM
 Section 9.6. MySQL Replication
 Section 9.7. Database Partitioning
 Section 9.8. Scaling Large Database
 Section 9.9. Scaling Storage
Chapter 10. Statistics, Monitoring, and Alerting
 Section 10.1. Tracking Web Statistics
 Section 10.2. Application Monitoring
 Section 10.3. Alerting
Chapter 11. APIs
 Section 11.1. Data Feeds
 Section 11.2. Mobile Content
 Section 11.3. Web Services
 Section 11.4. API Transports
 Section 11.5. API Abuse
 Section 11.6. Authentication
 Section 11.7. The Future

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This book is primarily about web application design: the design of software and hardware systems for web applications. We'll be looking at application architecture, development practices, technologies, Unicode, and general infrastructural work. Perhaps as importantly, this book is about the development of web applications: the practice of building the hardware and implementing the software systems that we design. While the theory of application design is all well and good (and an essential part of the whole process), we need to recognize that the implementation plays a very important part in the construction of large applications and needs to be borne in mind during the design process. If we're designing things that we can't build, then we can't know if we're designing the right thing.

This book is not about programming. At least, not really. Rather than talking about snippets of code, function names, and so forth, we'll be looking at generalized techniques and approaches for building web applications. While the book does contain some snippets of example code, they are just that: examples. Most of the code examples in this book can be used only in the context of a larger application or infrastructure.

A lot of what we'll be looking at relates to designing application architectures and building application infrastructures. In the field of web applications, infrastructures tend to mean a combination of hardware platform, software platform, and maintenance and development practices. We'll consider how all of these fit together to build a seamless infrastructure for large-scale applications.