WebSitesOfNote

Doing Big Things with 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, 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: 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 of enterprise adoption of the LAMP stack. 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. Lightwe"