

  Help, I’m clueless about Web Service scalability  - jmorin007
http://scobleizer.com/2008/10/05/help-im-clueless-about-web-service-scalability/

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jhancock
Scalability is a way of asking “how do you engineer something well?”. If
you’re a software engineer with enough experience, the answer is that making
something scalable has no silver bullet. You just “write good software”. So
what does that mean?

In part, it means encapsulating your design and code at a mid to low level of
granularity. If you are strict with encapsulation techniques (following pure
OO and message passing design is a solid method) it doesn’t matter what
languages or libraries or databases you use in each part as you simply
rewrite/replace components as they become bottlenecks.

This approach allows you to get a full system bootstrapped without need to
optimize components ahead of time.

The whole point of a web service is that you have a simple API and others
don’t care about how you implement internals. So taking an API-centric design
approach is key. This approach is not new to the fact that we call the API a
"web service" these days. The same tried and true software engineering methods
are called for.

If you don't like the above answer and want a more concrete answer on how to
make something scalable, then just study erlang ;).

