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Ask Slashdot: Building a Web App Scalable To Hundreds of Thousand of Users?
AleX122 writes "I have an idea for a web app. Things I know: I am not the first person with a brilliant idea. Many others 'inventors' failed and it may happen to me, but without trying the outcome will always be failure. That said, the project will be huge if successful. However, I currently do not have money needed to hire developers. I have pretty solid experience in Java, GWT, HTML, Hibernate/Eclipselink, SQL/PLSQL/Oracle. The downside is project nature. All applications I've developed to date were hosted on single server or in small cluster (2 tomcats with fail-over). The application, if I succeed, will have to serve thousands of users simultaneously. The userbase will come from all over the world. (Consider infrastructure requirements similar to a social network.) My questions: What technologies should I use now to ensure easy scaling for a future traffic increase? I need distributed processing and data storage. I would like to stick to open standards, so Google App Engine or a similar proprietary cloud solution isn't acceptable. Since I do not have the resources to hire a team of developers and I will be the first coder, it would be nice if technology used is Java related. However, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so I am open to technologies unrelated to Java."
OpenStack. You can start with a hosting provider like Rackspace that has as a faithful implementation of it. I know they were recently pinged for some incompatibility, but they have vowed to fix that. If you still can't stomach it, choose a different OpenStack provider. OpenStack is the key.
When you get really big, then you can work on running your own datacenter or paying someone to host the hardware for you (again, Rackspace, DreamHost, etc.). Then you can put your own implementation of OpenStack on the hardware with all the customization specific to your needs. This will naturally build on top of your years of investment with the vanilla OpenStack when you were smaller. The progression path is laid out for you.
I'm replying to this parent because Heroku is also an excellent choice for scaling where you pay as you grow. I'm just not sure if you can later fork Heroku to suit your needs with the datacenter supplier of your choice.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
"They then offloaded parts of the infrastructure to Scala of all things.
http://blog.redfin.com/devblog/2010/05/how_and_why_twitter_uses_scala.html [redfin.com]
Scala is interesting and has some good paradigms built in to the language for the things Twitter needs to do. Not sure if it is really fundamentally better than Java though - after all it runs on the same JVM."
Disclaimer: I was a developer at Twitter until last year.
From the point of view of scalability, Scala is so much more advanced than Java it's not even funny. Ultimately, this boils down to the adoption of immutability as a core concept of the language. In particular, Scala's approach to concurrency is a decade or more ahead of what's in use in Java. Finagle, Twitter's async RPC system, simply wouldn't have been deliverable in a language that makes the use of Futures as difficult as Java does.
"Plus I like static typing."
Scala is statically typed.