I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
At Authoring time, or Reading time.
I attended the VS2005 launch yesterday. Yawn! I was hoping that the key note would give me the 2 hours guided tour though VS and SQL. Instead it was customer propaganda. Still good to see a great turnout from the local dev community.
Anyway, it got me thinking that the current web dev model assumes smarts on the web server when the page is hit. A huge number of web sites have only semi dynamic content. In the case of my blog, our company web site and most product catalogues, the content only changes when authoring takes place. So I author a blog item, hitting the database, and each user that sees my site or pulls down my RSS feed, brings back exactly the same data until I load up a new posting. If I get 1000 hits per day my database hits are 1 (write) +1000 (read).
On my web site I run ASP.Net and SQL Database. What overkill.
Really I just need a local publishing database and push out HTML. Then I could store all my content say in Access, and I wouldn’t even care what type of WebServer I have. I could just publish HTML pages. So no database on my website.
Serving straight HTML is so much less effort, and also allows caching around the network to reduce server load significantly.
Even if there was some true dynamic content, like if I had personalisation, then still 95% of my website is semi dynamic and could be pushed out. I may still need a database but the number of hits would be substantially reduced, and therefore scalability significantly improved.
My point is that the Dev Tools assume a big server. It’s not straight forward to use the same dev tools for a ‘push out HTML’ type model. I still would want to author in Visual Studio, but I would have to write a custom app to flip my model around to this much simpler way of working.
Update: Darren sent me this …
I was just about to set aside a rainy sunday afternoon to develop client-side or HTML-push authoring tool when I found this
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/
fits the bill rather nicely.
HTML Push Authoring Tool! Yes that’s exactly what I meant!
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