Papers in PDF format

3) Distributed Design
Although Object and Distributed often overlap when they are discussed, one does
not necessarily imply the other. One can still have an object oriented system that
does not distribute effectively. The Aria system architecture fully supports
distributing the web activity recording, accessing and reporting information across
multiple physical machines, multiple webservers, multiple geographies and multiple
users. The integrity and control of this distributed information system is
maintained in the Aria.store database module. The expected benefits of this
approach are not merely increased performance and scaleability, but also enabling a
higher level use of the global information base. Users will be able to easily
compare their own results with those of participating companies in similar
industries around the world by the click of a button. Individual companies will be
able to easily aggregate data from websites running at remote divisions all over the
world with a click of a button. If the underlying architecture does not support
information being distributed logically as well as physically, trying to accomplish
this after the fact is impossible.
4) Open, Standard, Plug and Play
Andromedia has chosen a design that completely adheres to the spirit of the Web
in that we “plug in” without forcing any modifications to the “plugs” or “wall
sockets”. To initiate the capture of the “raw data”, we do not require the web
server software companies to make any modification to their software. We simply
link directly in through their published API’s as a .so file in Unix, or through a dll
on NT. While we are processing the information for downstream or real-time use
we are inside our own world applying our proprietary processing techniques
(described later in this paper).
Once our Aria.recorder engine has completed its tasks the information is presented
to the outside world through a published API that has been designed in
cooperation with the leading web application companies looking to access this
information. In addition, this API is completely extensible to accommodate the
needs of application classes that will most certainly proliferate in the near future.
The Andromedia API essentially defines the way an application will view the
stored data either in real-time or on a persistent basis. These API’s are called from
either C or Perl function calls, with a Java interface planned for the second release.
______________________________________________________________________________
The Aria Architecture Page 14 Andromedia, Inc.
White Paper July 1996