Building Scalable Web Sites

Preface

The first web application I built was called Terrania. A visitor could come to the web site, create a virtual creature with some customizations, and then track that creature’s progress through a virtual world. Creatures would wander about, eat plants (or other creatures), fight battles, and mate with other players’ creatures. This activity would then be reported back to players by twice-daily emails summarizing the day’s events.

Calling it a web application is a bit of a stretch; at the time I certainly wouldn’t have categorized it as such. The core of the game was a program written in C++ that ran on a single machine, loading game data from a single flat file, processing everything for the game “tick,” and storing it all again in a single flat file. When I started building the game, the runtime was destined to become the server component of a client-server game architecture. Programming network data-exchange at the time was a difficult process that tended to involve writing a lot of rote code just to exchange strings between a server and client (we had no .NET in those days).

The Web gave application developers a ready-to-use platform for content delivery across a network, cutting out the trickier parts of client-server applications. We were free to build the server that did the interesting parts while building a client in simple HTML that was trivial in comparison. What would have traditionally been the client component of Terrania resided on the server, simply accessing ...