Challenges and practices in deploying Web acceleration solutions for distributed enterprise systems

For most Web-based applications, contents are created dynamically based on the current state of a business, such as product prices and inventory, stored in database systems. These applications demand personalized content and track user behavior while maintaining application integrity. Many of such practices are not compatible with Web acceleration solutions. Consequently, although many web acceleration solutions have shown promising performance improvement and scalability, architecting and engineering distributed enterprise Web applications to utilize available content delivery networks remain a challenge. In this paper, we examine the challenge to accelerate J2EE-based enterprise web applications. We list obstacles and recommend some practices to transform typical database-driven J2EE applications to cache friendly Web applications where Web acceleration solutions can be applied. Furthermore, such transformation should be done without modification to the underlying application business logic and without sacrificing functions that are essential to e-commerce. We take the J2EE reference software, the Java PetStore, as a case study. By using the proposed guideline, we are able to cache more than 90% of the content in the PetStore and scale up the Web site more than 20 times.