Open Standards and Mobility: Scaling, whether on a single university server or a massively distributed e-commerce application, is a challenge that just about every coder will encounter at some point in a career. And mobility only compounds the scaling issue, as new mobile phone and PDA-powered users begin banging on web applications designed for desktop and laptop browsers. A rugged mobile solution can be built in mobile operating systems like Palm OS, Symbian OS, Windows CE, etc. Learn about mobile open standards, competing technologies with WML, and more.

---

by Geoff Koch, editor. Intel Corp.

The URL coursework.stanford.edu had humble enough beginnings in the late 1990s.

"It started as a research project and I was the only developer working on it," said Scott Stocker, a former Master's student who today is director of Web communications at Stanford.

The online course management tool is used by around 600 professors each quarter to post assignments, foster online discussion and administer quizzes. Stocker, who has long since moved on and up the Stanford IT hierarchy, left behind a full-time staff of four to manage the application he built from scratch.

Scaling, whether on a single university server or a massively distributed e-commerce application, is a challenge that just about every coder will encounter at some point in a career. And mobility only compounds the scaling issue, as new phone and PDA-powered users begin banging on Web applications designed for desktop and laptop browsers.

From academia to industry, hands-on programmers are using a handful of best practices to address the explosion of scaling issues. Many are still employing an eat-your-vegetables kind of coding common sense. But a rising tide of tools, applications, and documentation may soon make it easier to mobilize Web applications for new and different kinds of users.

Coding and mobile users
Stocker's users were professors who, despite having impressive resum's and jobs at tech-steeped Stanford, had varying degrees of Web competency. The application had to be flexible (to be useful both to the Web pros and knaves on the faculty), robust (if it crashed or was buggy, no one would use it) and inexpensive (Stocker was a staff of one funded by a small grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, to develop new learning management tools).

The approach, as is fairly common in academia, was to get the ball rolling with open standards and open source.

The application's lower level guts were all open source, as Stocker built on top of the Linux operating system and mySQL database. Though it was a pre-J2EE world, Stocker still choose Java, and relied heavily on servlets and JSPs.

Unlike Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs, Java servlets are persistent, standing by in memory to fulfill multiple requests once they're started. Beyond the benefits of separating a Web page's logic from its static elements, JSPs aren't restricted to any specific platform or server.

As coursework.stanford.edu moved from this-might-actually-work to mission critical, Stanford's main IT shop eventually stepped in to support Stocker's creation. Stanford IT is a Sun/Solaris/Oracle database environment, but the open source Java APIs plugged in easily enough to this backend.

"It's just the nature of Java Web applications that make them easy to scale," said Stocker. "The [Java] platform is TCP/IP based. It doesn't matter if the database is on a separate computer; the JDBC protocol allows for easy communication with the database over TCP/IP."