Back sometime in 2004/2005 when I was the CIO/SVP of Engineering for CNET Networks, they shot a video of me explaining, “Scaling out an Internet Architecture“. I was thinking about the current publishing system at AOL, DynaPub, that we developed in 2007 after I arrived. It was interesting after I watched the video again how close DynaPub follows the key principles described in it.
The only parts the video does not cover are:
- Use of Lucene as the Search engine and SOLR as the container to hold Lucene (we invented SOLR while I was at CNET).
- Use of XML over HTTP as the transport layer between the App Servers and DBs / Search engine.
- Use of denormalized MySQL tables for speed
- The main tool, the CMS, and its very specialized table structure for high-performance.
The AOL Publishing system is the fourth generation publishing system that I have been involved in either designing or managing. IMHO, most of the: bloated, over-designed, needlessly complex issues from previous publishing systems have been eradicated in DynaPub. It also has ZERO licensing or maintenance costs as it is all built on open-source – including the operating system – as mentioned in a previous blog post here.