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Chapter Three: Andromedia’s Aria Web Recording, Accessing
and Reporting Platform
Introduction
Aria dramatically improves the effectiveness of World Wide Web applications. It
enhances the subjective experience of World Wide Web users and increases understanding
of website activity for site owners.
Operating a website without Aria is equivalent to the National Weather Service tracking
weather patterns without satellites.
Market requirements and technical requirements considered performance, system
scaleability and object model extensibility as the most critical elements of a Web activity
recording, accessing and reporting system. Andromedia’s design goals were based on the
assumption that the top ten web sites of today, measured in terms of activity and
complexity of content, will represent the average web site on the Web in less than 18
months. With this assumption in mind, we constructed a system architecture that could
handle peak traffic in excess of 10 million hits per day, can scale up and down smoothly
making optimal use of all hardware components, and is completely open and flexible to
accommodate the many unforeseen requirements for activity accounting information that
may arise in the future.
Primary Design Choices
To respond to the general requirements in the market, Andromedia has made the following
choices which serve as the skeleton of our system architecture and make up the basic
architecture infrastructure in which we have implemented the Aria Web recording,
accessing and reporting system.
1) Pure Object-oriented Approach to Building the System
There were four primary reasons for this decision:
• Crucial to enabling us to build a highly modularized system, whereby each
module could be distributed and executed on multiple processors or
multiple systems across a local or wide area network. It is this capability of
distributing the processing that is one of the key enablers of our
performance and scaleability advantage.
• Essential in supporting the level of extensibility the market requires. The
object approach to schema design for the database uniquely enables
additional API interfaces to be added without having to go back and rebuild
the entire database schema. This allows support to be added for new
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The Aria Architecture Page 12 Andromedia, Inc.
White Paper July 1996