Architectural cornerstones

Recently I was listening to the excellent episode of Software Engineering Radio about the new Guardian.co.uk website.

There is also an article about the same project on InfoQ, focussing on the DDD aspects.

As an aspiring architect I am sucking up qualitative and quantitive characteristics of interesting enterprise applications.

So here is my summary of the facts as I understood them:

The application stack consists of

Velocity as view technology

Spring

Hibernate3

Oracle

The interesting points here are:

No EJBs are used, just WAR deployment.

No higher-level view-framework is used, just templating with velocity.

The productive system is depoyed on Caucho Resin, no heavyweight appication server.

The nonfunctional requirements are:

180 million hits a month

18 million unique users

17 Pages/s per Server with 8 servers as peak-performance

The developer-team has peaked at 104 members. Those were split up in 4 smaller teams.

One of the most interesting aspect from a development perspective is the fact, that the business people are actually responsible for the domain model, not the programmers!

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