You are viewing a plain text version of this content. The canonical link for it is here.
Posted to dev@cocoon.apache.org by Pier Fumagalli <ro...@betaversion.org> on 2004/05/21 18:11:28 UTC
[ANN] Thanks for it...
It is with great pleasure I can announce that after 4 years of working
on/with/around Cocoon, _my_ "first" real site has gone live...
From this morning at 8:32 AM (BST) http://www.vnunet.com/ is running
off a standard 2.1.5 (head) distribution of Cocoon, Apache 2.0.49 w/
mod_cache, Jetty 4.2.19, and a hint of my take on the Cocoon kernel
empowering the backend XML data repository...
I'd like to thank personally Luminas, ProNetics and Orixo's Jeremy
(Quinn), Andrew (Savory) and Gianugo (Rabellino) for helping us making
this project a realiiy, especially when no-one thought it would have
been possible (given our deadlines).
And I would like to thank personally every single one of you who wrote
the code now powering our website... We wouldn't have been able to put
this live today without every single one of you...
Really _really_ tired...
Pier
Re: Nice! but pagenotfound (was Re: [ANN] Thanks for it...)
Posted by Pier Fumagalli <pi...@betaversion.org>.
Fixed... We're still having some issues navigating back and forth
between the old JSP site (www2) and the new Cocoon powered one (www)
:-P
Pier
On 22 May 2004, at 10:03, Jorg Heymans wrote:
> great site !!
>
> I get a http://www2.vnunet.com/PageNotFound error though when doing
> the following
>
> - start from main site
> - click on the job tab
> - search for a job keyword (ie put in java or something)
> - then click on downloads tab
>
> I put a screenshot on http://www.domek.be/pagenotfound.jpg.
>
> rgds
> Jorg
>
> Pier Fumagalli wrote:
>> It is with great pleasure I can announce that after 4 years of
>> working on/with/around Cocoon, _my_ "first" real site has gone
>> live...
>> From this morning at 8:32 AM (BST) http://www.vnunet.com/ is running
>> off a standard 2.1.5 (head) distribution of Cocoon, Apache 2.0.49 w/
>> mod_cache, Jetty 4.2.19, and a hint of my take on the Cocoon kernel
>> empowering the backend XML data repository...
>> I'd like to thank personally Luminas, ProNetics and Orixo's Jeremy
>> (Quinn), Andrew (Savory) and Gianugo (Rabellino) for helping us
>> making this project a realiiy, especially when no-one thought it
>> would have been possible (given our deadlines).
>> And I would like to thank personally every single one of you who
>> wrote the code now powering our website... We wouldn't have been able
>> to put this live today without every single one of you...
>> Really _really_ tired...
>> Pier
>
>
Nice! but pagenotfound (was Re: [ANN] Thanks for it...)
Posted by Jorg Heymans <jh...@domek.be>.
great site !!
I get a http://www2.vnunet.com/PageNotFound error though when doing the
following
- start from main site
- click on the job tab
- search for a job keyword (ie put in java or something)
- then click on downloads tab
I put a screenshot on http://www.domek.be/pagenotfound.jpg.
rgds
Jorg
Pier Fumagalli wrote:
> It is with great pleasure I can announce that after 4 years of working
> on/with/around Cocoon, _my_ "first" real site has gone live...
>
> From this morning at 8:32 AM (BST) http://www.vnunet.com/ is running
> off a standard 2.1.5 (head) distribution of Cocoon, Apache 2.0.49 w/
> mod_cache, Jetty 4.2.19, and a hint of my take on the Cocoon kernel
> empowering the backend XML data repository...
>
> I'd like to thank personally Luminas, ProNetics and Orixo's Jeremy
> (Quinn), Andrew (Savory) and Gianugo (Rabellino) for helping us making
> this project a realiiy, especially when no-one thought it would have
> been possible (given our deadlines).
>
> And I would like to thank personally every single one of you who wrote
> the code now powering our website... We wouldn't have been able to put
> this live today without every single one of you...
>
> Really _really_ tired...
>
> Pier
>
>
Re: [ANN] Thanks for it...
Posted by Matthew Langham <ml...@s-und-n.de>.
Congratulations Pier and "crew" :-)!
Sounds like some long nights....
Matthew
On 21.05.2004, at 18:11, Pier Fumagalli wrote:
> It is with great pleasure I can announce that after 4 years of working
> on/with/around Cocoon, _my_ "first" real site has gone live...
>
> From this morning at 8:32 AM (BST) http://www.vnunet.com/ is running
> off a standard 2.1.5 (head) distribution of Cocoon, Apache 2.0.49 w/
> mod_cache, Jetty 4.2.19, and a hint of my take on the Cocoon kernel
> empowering the backend XML data repository...
>
> I'd like to thank personally Luminas, ProNetics and Orixo's Jeremy
> (Quinn), Andrew (Savory) and Gianugo (Rabellino) for helping us making
> this project a realiiy, especially when no-one thought it would have
> been possible (given our deadlines).
>
> And I would like to thank personally every single one of you who wrote
> the code now powering our website... We wouldn't have been able to put
> this live today without every single one of you...
>
> Really _really_ tired...
>
> Pier
>
Re: [ANN] Thanks for it...
Posted by Jeremy Quinn <je...@media.demon.co.uk>.
On 21 May 2004, at 17:11, Pier Fumagalli wrote:
> It is with great pleasure I can announce that after 4 years of working
> on/with/around Cocoon, _my_ "first" real site has gone live...
>
> From this morning at 8:32 AM (BST) http://www.vnunet.com/ is running
> off a standard 2.1.5 (head) distribution of Cocoon, Apache 2.0.49 w/
> mod_cache, Jetty 4.2.19, and a hint of my take on the Cocoon kernel
> empowering the backend XML data repository...
>
> I'd like to thank personally Luminas, ProNetics and Orixo's Jeremy
> (Quinn), Andrew (Savory) and Gianugo (Rabellino) for helping us making
> this project a realiiy, especially when no-one thought it would have
> been possible (given our deadlines).
>
> And I would like to thank personally every single one of you who wrote
> the code now powering our website... We wouldn't have been able to put
> this live today without every single one of you...
>
> Really _really_ tired...
>
> Pier
>
>
Yeah, I am just catching up with my email ;)
Many thanks for the thanks, Pier !!!!
It was a pleasure and an honour to work with you and the great team you
have there.
And of course ..... many thanks for the Cocoon team for such great
tools !!!!
regards Jeremy
Re: [ANN] Thanks for it...
Posted by Joerg Heinicke <jo...@gmx.de>.
On 21.05.2004 18:11, Pier Fumagalli wrote:
> It is with great pleasure I can announce that after 4 years of working
> on/with/around Cocoon, _my_ "first" real site has gone live...
>
> From this morning at 8:32 AM (BST) http://www.vnunet.com/ is running
> off a standard 2.1.5 (head) distribution of Cocoon, Apache 2.0.49 w/
> mod_cache, Jetty 4.2.19, and a hint of my take on the Cocoon kernel
> empowering the backend XML data repository...
>
> I'd like to thank personally Luminas, ProNetics and Orixo's Jeremy
> (Quinn), Andrew (Savory) and Gianugo (Rabellino) for helping us making
> this project a realiiy, especially when no-one thought it would have
> been possible (given our deadlines).
>
> And I would like to thank personally every single one of you who wrote
> the code now powering our website... We wouldn't have been able to put
> this live today without every single one of you...
>
> Really _really_ tired...
>
> Pier
Congratulations. Do you want to keep me from adding it to the livesites?
Joerg
Re: [ANN] Thanks for it...
Posted by David Crossley <cr...@apache.org>.
Pier Fumagalli wrote:
<snip/>
>
> And I would like to thank personally every single one of you who wrote
> the code now powering our website... We wouldn't have been able to put
> this live today without every single one of you...
Yeah. Please also thank your boss for enabling you to
contribute so much to Cocoon.
I notice that the "infrastructure guy" does not rate a mention at
http://www.vnunet.com/about/team
--David
Re: [ANN] Thanks for it...
Posted by Stefano Mazzocchi <st...@apache.org>.
Pier Fumagalli wrote:
> On 22 May 2004, at 09:13, Ugo Cei wrote:
>
>> Il giorno 21/mag/04, alle 18:11, Pier Fumagalli ha scritto:
>>
>>> From this morning at 8:32 AM (BST) http://www.vnunet.com/ is running
>>> off a standard 2.1.5 (head) distribution of Cocoon, Apache 2.0.49 w/
>>> mod_cache, Jetty 4.2.19, and a hint of my take on the Cocoon kernel
>>> empowering the backend XML data repository...
>>
>>
>> Congratulations! Can you give us some more details? How many pages are
>> you serving daily and on which hardware, for instance? I think success
>> stories like yours are important to demonstrate that Cocoon is able to
>> serve lots of content with good performance.
>
>
> Well, let's say that Cocoon is most definitely NOT the "performant"
> component on the site...
>
> The pages are generated going through something like 2 megs of
> aggregated XML documents, and given the structure of the site (and the
> fact that we're still not 100% confident) we're using non-caching
> pipelines...
>
> In other words, it takes us roughly between 1 and 2 seconds to generate
> one single HTML page (whoha, bessie)...
>
> But it's all cached on the front end by Apache's mod_disk_cache, so, in
> terms of performance, we don't seem to hit major problems.
>
> And seriously, we don't care much "how long" it takes to create a
> page... We're a news site, so the variation on URLs requested in a day
> is not much (currently my cache is filled up with something like 2000
> documents, even if you can have access to almost 100k articles on the
> site).
>
> And the architecture (with caching up front powered directly by Apache)
> allows us to withstand "slashdot-like" attacks very easily (the first
> one coming in generates the request, all the remaining freaks get the
> copy cached off on the disk)...
>
> It was a weird change from JSPs because those were never cached, and we
> had to put a lot of effort in actually making the JSP engine and code
> "fast"... With Cocoon, well, we know we wouldn't have been able to, so
> we thought out other ways to deal with it, and (more importantly) it
> forced us to think to a better and more scalable architecture...
>
> One example above all: advertisement tags... Before, a lot of the
> advertisement code was generated on the server on a PER REQUEST basis...
> Now, we can't do this anymore because of the load that that would put on
> our server, so, we had to re-engineer how to serve ads, relying (for
> instance) more on the client javascript engine... But the knowledge that
> _we_can_not_ pass through every single request to Cocoon, helped us in
> the sense that id made us aware of all those problems that (for
> instance) forbid us to deploy the same application on several different
> machines at the same time (so, no fault tolerance, no load balancing, no
> nothing)...
>
> Now, the AMAZING thing, was the SPEED at which the site was developed...
> Three weeks for the whole shabang...
>
> Do that with JSP, yeah, right! :-)
>
> The severe and "restrictive" contracts that cocoon imposes to the users
> of its services might seem harsh at first (the, how do I do this, Cocoon
> doesn't do that syndrome was felt quite strongly at the beginning), but
> on the other hand, it forced us to _THINK_... To think about what we
> wanted our website to do, and how one single aspecto of it related with
> the rest of the site. Yes, we wrote some small hacks, or shortcuts, but
> amazingly enough, after the first 1 and a half weeks spent by Jerm
> getting all the information sorted out (with nothing moving forward and
> my manager freaking out), the rest of the functionality came out in the
> remaining two.... And we have a TON of pages up there...
>
> It proved me (to my managers, and to the rest of the team) that
> limitations in contracts, and clear defined rules and boundaries out of
> which you cannot go to, even if they MIGHT seem counterproductive at
> first are clearly an advantage in developing and managing complex
> project...
>
> In terms of what you ask about performance and so on, I still don't have
> many figures but what I mentioned above... I know for sure that there's
> a HELL-OF-A-LOT that we can (and we will) improve, for now, we decided
> that no matter what, we had enough hardware to throw at the baby to
> match any possible requirement..
>
> We started off thinking about 4 machines (HP/380s running Linux w/ 2
> Gigs o' ram and 2 3.2 gigs procs each, in other words, big stuff)... We
> already scaled down on only two of those (and we kept two not for
> performance, but for failover)...
>
> In the future I think that we're going to use all four of them (once all
> the sites we host will be moved to Cocoon), but maybe separate out the
> hardware on classes of functionality (two for serving/caching, two for
> generating content), but we'll see how the baby adapts and how it
> behaves over the next few weeks...
>
> For now I'm happy that it works, it works better than expected, and that
> the concepts behind the machinery are stronger than any possible
> performance hack you can possibly think of: if you need speed, even if
> Cocoon is not _THAT_ fast, you can get it to serve the heck out of it
> anyhow. You only need to _THINK_ about your problems and not rely on
> some magic software to magically run your badly-designed web-application
> fast enough! :-P
Well, tell you want: I write my thesis on this and I did some heuristic
analysis but seeing it working for real on one of the big sites out
there... gee, I'm happy man, very happy.
:-D
--
Stefano, who today had a (very friendly) discussion with TimBL face to
face in front of the web-dev crowd about the future of URIs... boy,
weird day today.
Re: [ANN] Thanks for it...
Posted by Pier Fumagalli <pi...@betaversion.org>.
On 22 May 2004, at 09:13, Ugo Cei wrote:
> Il giorno 21/mag/04, alle 18:11, Pier Fumagalli ha scritto:
>
>> From this morning at 8:32 AM (BST) http://www.vnunet.com/ is running
>> off a standard 2.1.5 (head) distribution of Cocoon, Apache 2.0.49 w/
>> mod_cache, Jetty 4.2.19, and a hint of my take on the Cocoon kernel
>> empowering the backend XML data repository...
>
> Congratulations! Can you give us some more details? How many pages are
> you serving daily and on which hardware, for instance? I think success
> stories like yours are important to demonstrate that Cocoon is able to
> serve lots of content with good performance.
Well, let's say that Cocoon is most definitely NOT the "performant"
component on the site...
The pages are generated going through something like 2 megs of
aggregated XML documents, and given the structure of the site (and the
fact that we're still not 100% confident) we're using non-caching
pipelines...
In other words, it takes us roughly between 1 and 2 seconds to generate
one single HTML page (whoha, bessie)...
But it's all cached on the front end by Apache's mod_disk_cache, so, in
terms of performance, we don't seem to hit major problems.
And seriously, we don't care much "how long" it takes to create a
page... We're a news site, so the variation on URLs requested in a day
is not much (currently my cache is filled up with something like 2000
documents, even if you can have access to almost 100k articles on the
site).
And the architecture (with caching up front powered directly by Apache)
allows us to withstand "slashdot-like" attacks very easily (the first
one coming in generates the request, all the remaining freaks get the
copy cached off on the disk)...
It was a weird change from JSPs because those were never cached, and we
had to put a lot of effort in actually making the JSP engine and code
"fast"... With Cocoon, well, we know we wouldn't have been able to, so
we thought out other ways to deal with it, and (more importantly) it
forced us to think to a better and more scalable architecture...
One example above all: advertisement tags... Before, a lot of the
advertisement code was generated on the server on a PER REQUEST
basis... Now, we can't do this anymore because of the load that that
would put on our server, so, we had to re-engineer how to serve ads,
relying (for instance) more on the client javascript engine... But the
knowledge that _we_can_not_ pass through every single request to
Cocoon, helped us in the sense that id made us aware of all those
problems that (for instance) forbid us to deploy the same application
on several different machines at the same time (so, no fault tolerance,
no load balancing, no nothing)...
Now, the AMAZING thing, was the SPEED at which the site was
developed... Three weeks for the whole shabang...
Do that with JSP, yeah, right! :-)
The severe and "restrictive" contracts that cocoon imposes to the users
of its services might seem harsh at first (the, how do I do this,
Cocoon doesn't do that syndrome was felt quite strongly at the
beginning), but on the other hand, it forced us to _THINK_... To think
about what we wanted our website to do, and how one single aspecto of
it related with the rest of the site. Yes, we wrote some small hacks,
or shortcuts, but amazingly enough, after the first 1 and a half weeks
spent by Jerm getting all the information sorted out (with nothing
moving forward and my manager freaking out), the rest of the
functionality came out in the remaining two.... And we have a TON of
pages up there...
It proved me (to my managers, and to the rest of the team) that
limitations in contracts, and clear defined rules and boundaries out of
which you cannot go to, even if they MIGHT seem counterproductive at
first are clearly an advantage in developing and managing complex
project...
In terms of what you ask about performance and so on, I still don't
have many figures but what I mentioned above... I know for sure that
there's a HELL-OF-A-LOT that we can (and we will) improve, for now, we
decided that no matter what, we had enough hardware to throw at the
baby to match any possible requirement..
We started off thinking about 4 machines (HP/380s running Linux w/ 2
Gigs o' ram and 2 3.2 gigs procs each, in other words, big stuff)... We
already scaled down on only two of those (and we kept two not for
performance, but for failover)...
In the future I think that we're going to use all four of them (once
all the sites we host will be moved to Cocoon), but maybe separate out
the hardware on classes of functionality (two for serving/caching, two
for generating content), but we'll see how the baby adapts and how it
behaves over the next few weeks...
For now I'm happy that it works, it works better than expected, and
that the concepts behind the machinery are stronger than any possible
performance hack you can possibly think of: if you need speed, even if
Cocoon is not _THAT_ fast, you can get it to serve the heck out of it
anyhow. You only need to _THINK_ about your problems and not rely on
some magic software to magically run your badly-designed
web-application fast enough! :-P
Pier
Re: [ANN] Thanks for it...
Posted by Ugo Cei <ug...@apache.org>.
Il giorno 21/mag/04, alle 18:11, Pier Fumagalli ha scritto:
> From this morning at 8:32 AM (BST) http://www.vnunet.com/ is running
> off a standard 2.1.5 (head) distribution of Cocoon, Apache 2.0.49 w/
> mod_cache, Jetty 4.2.19, and a hint of my take on the Cocoon kernel
> empowering the backend XML data repository...
Congratulations! Can you give us some more details? How many pages are
you serving daily and on which hardware, for instance? I think success
stories like yours are important to demonstrate that Cocoon is able to
serve lots of content with good performance.
Ugo
--
Ugo Cei - http://beblogging.com/
Re: [ANN] Thanks for it...
Posted by go...@osmosis.gr.
Its GREAT
congratulation pier
--stavros
On Fri, 21 May 2004, Pier Fumagalli wrote:
> It is with great pleasure I can announce that after 4 years of working
> on/with/around Cocoon, _my_ "first" real site has gone live...
>
> From this morning at 8:32 AM (BST) http://www.vnunet.com/ is running
> off a standard 2.1.5 (head) distribution of Cocoon, Apache 2.0.49 w/
> mod_cache, Jetty 4.2.19, and a hint of my take on the Cocoon kernel
> empowering the backend XML data repository...
>
> I'd like to thank personally Luminas, ProNetics and Orixo's Jeremy
> (Quinn), Andrew (Savory) and Gianugo (Rabellino) for helping us making
> this project a realiiy, especially when no-one thought it would have
> been possible (given our deadlines).
>
> And I would like to thank personally every single one of you who wrote
> the code now powering our website... We wouldn't have been able to put
> this live today without every single one of you...
>
> Really _really_ tired...
>
> Pier
>
>