Alternative Approaches to Distribute An E-Commerce Document Management System

This experience paper describes newsblaster.com, a commercial document management system that facilitates exchange of news worthy documents between two user communities: a) editor of newspapers and magazines who seek to publish articles, and b) member companies who want to disseminate information such as new product o erings, product recalls, alliances with other companies, etc. We focus on the Internet connection of a single node web server as the system bottleneck and discuss three alternative approaches to distribute the application across multiple nodes. The rst, termed vertical, analyzes the semantics of the application and distributes it across multiple nodes based on its community of users and how they access the system. The second, termed horizontal, declusters the application's data across multiple nodes with the objective to distribute client requests evenly across these nodes. Finally, hybrid considers a horizontal partitioning of services identi ed by a vertical partitioning. We describe the application of each approach to newsblaster.