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application interfaces without disturbing the API’s already in place
supporting other application classes.
• Over the lifetime of a product, object is the most productive software
development environment available. More time is invested up front
designing the object model and the overall architecture, but with the design
done, new versions and extensions to existing products are published much
faster than with conventional programming. This enables Andromedia to
shorten product development cycles considerably, thereby getting newer
products in the hands of our customers faster.
• Object is inherently the most suitable environment for building software
systems that will reside on the WWW, as the Web itself is an object
oriented environment.
Overall, the product Andromedia is building is expected to link inextricably to
many other modules provided by companies other than Andromedia. Therefore,
choosing an object paradigm for building our solution is critically important.
2) Multi-threading for Scaleability and High Performance
To capture and manage the volumes of data generated by websites today and
project volume just 18 months from today, Andromedia must make full use of all
available hardware in the network as well as hardware local to the servers running
the network. Andromedia simply had no option of building single-threaded
systems that only work serially on one process or one transaction at a time. It is
required to load-balance the processing across hardware resources within a single
system and across a network. Every available resource in the network must be
considered a potential candidate to assist in balancing the load. Beyond simple
course-grained “multi-process” architectures of the past 10 years, “threads” have
become the leading way of achieving maximum performance out of available
hardware. Threads are a finer grained approach to splitting up a task for
processing. Thousands of threads can be combined to make up single processes.
Without multi-threading the Andromedia system performance overall would be
limited to the performance of a single thread path through the hardware and
network platform. With multi-threading, the performance ceiling is lifted by at
least a factor of 1,000.
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The Aria Architecture Page 13 Andromedia, Inc.
White Paper July 1996