Static HTML Will Do
I just ran across a really good web site consisting of what appears to be nothing more than static HTML, updated about once per month. As far as I can tell, there is nothing interactive about the site, such as the ability to submit comments. On an About page, they list the following technologies:
- JSP 1.2
- JSTL 1.0
- Java Servlets 2.3
- Struts 1.1
- JDBC 3.0
- MySQL 4.0.13
- Tomcat 5.0
- Spring 1.2
- Hibernate 2.1
Holy balls. I wonder how well that holds up to the Slashdot Digg effect compared to a site based on static files?
Tech Overkill
My hunch is that this is just someone’s passion and they used these tools because…well…they wanted to. That’s fine for a personal web site — do what makes you happy.
But I wonder how many “real” apps go to such technology extremes when something as simple as static HTML with perhaps some custom publishing scripts are sufficient, if not better?
My site (ronpaulgraphs.com) has handled over half a million page views in a single day. It uses a pile of java technologies and mysql… but it uses them to generate a pile of “static” html and pngs… then serves all that up with plain old apache… using javascript and cookies.. and maybe eventually some light weight “web services”… I can offer up content that changes every 5 minutes and is fairly interactive… but I can handle many thousands of users in a day with the low end dedicated server from godaddy.
This is the first time I’ve used this type of architecture, and it was mostly by accident.. but I’ve been extremely happy and there are a number of other benefits I haven’t even gone into. I’ll certainly have it in my tool bag in the future
I once read a blog post/article that talked about going “baked” and not “fried”.
By “baked” they meant static HTML generated offline. Among the advantages was that it was crazy fast. A cool analogy, IMO.
Ted Neward has mentioned in talks that Amazon takes a hybrid approach. Part of their site is baked (and naturally much more is fried with every technology imaginable). The number of server calls needed to render the home page is unbelievable.
Not like I’m going to point you to the site, but I used Userland’s Radio software (http://radio.userland.com/) and a special ’static’ generating plug-in to maintain a site of mine for a long time. A lot of template tweaking on my part but it worked. That’s always the bottom line, does it work for you. Right now I’m looking at Joomla to set up a site for a relative. Ouch, can you say PHP headaches…
As Always…