Preserved Topic: front end servers

what is the difference between a front end server and a content development server?

sorry, I don't know. Sounds like buzzwords to me...
Although, If I was to make an educated guess, I'd say
that a front end server is the machine that handles the user interface (as opposed to the buissnes logic and the database interface, assuming a three-tier setup).
A content development server would be just that. A server to develop and test your content on. (althoug I'm unsure why anyone would have to 'test' his content.)

yours,

Tyberius Prime

A front-end server accepts requests from clients and routes them to the appropriate back-end server for processing.

The front end part is easy. It handles the connections.

The content developement server is a server to store content.

Yes can be based on a 3 tier modle.

More likely it is a part of a content developement package. Comes with version controls, multiple authoring tools. Basically a large waste of money. Content developement software is in my opinion the rich mans excuse to hire employees that don't know their shit. Get some employees trained with HTML, and have you web people design usable back end interfaces into your database and you have no need for the Content Developement Solutions.

-mage-

Thank you, you just settled my argument. I discouraged my client from buying an expensive Vignette solution and we are hand coding HTML.

Well Vignette is not a horrible solution for an enterprise level site.

I've used it for work for a while now though we are putting together a home rolled jsp based solution.
The general setup for Vignette though is actually basic.

One Content Management server which generates the content and then flushes it out to your server farm. One of the benefits of this type of system is that You can seperate out the content and the display so your content teams can just do the writing and it makes the reuse of HTML quite easy. Vignette relies heavily on flat HTML files which are generated dynamically which can be quite helpful on the server load.

However I would only recommend it for a large enterprise solution. It's a hefty chunk of change and takes a good chunk of development time to get it operational. however maintance is cut down considerably if you set it up properly in the first place.



:[ Computers let you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. ]:

what is a three tier setup?

I'm not familiar with the term but it sounds like our basic setup.

We have 3 tiers of servers. The first is a straight development environment. It's basically a playground where we can mess with our codebase without having any effect on the production servers. Once we have all our code QA'd we move the templates to the live servers. On the live server we have one production server that the content people can access to input content as well as all copyediting workflow tasks This server is not seen outside of the firewall so it is not subject to our general web traffic and it does the main page generation tasks. Once the content people are satisfied with their stories/whatever they can "flush" the pages to the live servers. On the live servers we mostly have static html pages for all our main stories since these pages only really need to be dynamic when the content is changed, keeps the server load down this way. Live on the front end we currently have 4 live servers handling the main bulk of the load. 3 that serve the genral pages generally thin client boxes that just deal the static stuff and then one cgi server for all our cgi tasks.





:[ Computers let you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. ]:

three-tier comes from software development. It basically means that you have three independant layers in your software:
UserInterface
Buisness Logic
DataStorage

I will say this. You can learn alot about rolling your own by looking at stuff like Vignette and others. We developed a CMS using PHP/MySQL without looking at anything else. Then, we looked at some high (and low) end stuff and got some cool ideas, and incorporated them into our solution. I think if you're a small-mid sized company, rolling your own is better, since you can tailor it to your own needs.

And don't forget about those ad servers! Is that a fourth tier? Plus the streaming media servers....



[This message has been edited by Pugzly (edited 01-22-2002).]