When Written: April 2010
Farmville is the biggest web application out there today
Whilst we are talking of technology which at first glance seems to have little use let’s take a look at Facebook and more importantly the popular games on it like Farmville, Fishville and Mafia Wars.
Why is this important? Well this column is about web applications and these games certainly qualify, but surely they are just simple games of very little consequence? Forget for a minute that it is ‘just a game’, imagine Farmville as a line of business web application. This application handles 28 million users a day, this makes it the largest Web application in the world currently. 3 Gigabits/ sec of data pass between Farmville application and Facebook so with this amount of data traffic a major use of caching with Memcache is used to make sure that performance is maintained.
I would hazard a guess that there are not many enterprise applications that can boast such capabilities, not bad for a bunch of ‘HTML Hairdressers’ ! Farmville is built on a LAMP platform using PHP and mySQL, not something I normally cover here, leaving such things to Kevin Partner but I thought that it would be worth mentioning that the just released Dreamweaver CS5 is becoming more and more a design tool for such sites as these.
The debugging capabilities are severely lacking in my opinion when compared to those of Visual Studio, also as Dreamweaver has no support for ASP .NET, for those of us developing with this technology it is becoming as much use as a chocolate teapot. But for PHP based web sites and static web sites it has some neat preview capabilities to help with getting your CSS behaving correctly; the ability to preview in multiple browsers without having the browsers installed on your machine is particularly neat.
I have a soft spot for Dreamweaver but I tend to find that I am using it less and less these days.
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton