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: editors of newspapers and magazines who seek to publish articles; and member companies who want to disseminate information such as new product offerings, product recalls, alliances with other companies, etc. The paper focuses on the Internet connection of a single node Web server as the system bottleneck and discusses three alternative approaches to distribute the application across multiple nodes. The first, 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. Hybrid, our third approach, considers a horizontal partitioning of services identified by a vertical partitioning. The paper describes the application of each approach to newsblaster