Friday, September 10, 2010

What will be the next web stack ?


Technology is something which improves rapidly. things we thought decade ago were impossible have become realistic today. Today The Internet plays a major role in day to day life. From one static web page has now become much more agile dynamic web sites and even the rich internet applications(RIA) has made The Internet a more exciting place. now with the emergence of concepts like cloud computing businesses and technology moves into a different direction.

What is a web stack ?
A web stack is simply a stack of software, mainly comprised of open source software, will contain an operating system, Web server, database server, and programming language. One of the most most well-known web stacks is LAMP.

Apache as a web server has been using more than a decade and served for many big web applications but can it do the same thing in next generation ?
with cloud computing it needs a more agile light weight and secure web server like lighttpd. lighttpd is an open source web server which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems. big web solutions like YouTube, Wikipedia  are already using lighttpd to serve their clients.
unlike in normal web applications Cloud computing solutions need a distributed file system like GoogleFS which was developed by Google and used by Google. So, Apache Hadoop with MogileFS can be used to fulfill that requirement. Apache Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google's MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers.Hadoop is a top-level Apache project being built and used by a global community of contributors, using the Java programming language. Yahoo! has been the largest contributor to the project, and uses Hadoop extensively across its businesses. 


So, with these new concepts and new technologies we could see a more reliable, secure, speed and agile world wide web.


Cheers !
Kesh,