J2EE™ Technology in Practice: Building Business Applications With the Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition

8.2. The Challenge

The development environment that Altura initially used to build and syndicate its customized online shopping malls proved difficult to scale when traffic to the sites suddenly began to increase. They also found flaws in the original development environment that caused unexpected crashes—yet a lack of sophisticated management and monitoring tools in that environment often left Altura IT personnel unaware that a server application had crashed.

Altura officials explored their options and finally concluded that there was no practical way to fix the problems their original environment presented. They could overcome the traffic management and server performance problems only by deploying a large number of servers to accommodate the ...