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September 20, 2006
Philly Rox! And They Might Just Prefer Stateful
posted by ari
Hung out at the Philly JUG last night:
http://duke.csc.villanova.edu/phillyjug/index.jsp
Those guys asked some great questions and really engaged on the topic of transparent clustering and stateful versus stateless application design. Interestingly enough, most of the 100 people in the room seemed to agree that stateless app design presents good operational characteristics. I can load balance using non-sticky (read: cheaper load balancing setup) and I can kill any app server at any time, unilaterally. Last, I can scale just by scaling my data store.
But, Serialization impacts, and OR-mapping can slow you down and that gets frustrating when you know the data you are storing really is only being saved BECAUSE you are stateless (truly transient data, but you want it around in case of server failure--like Spring Web Flow content or Struts' data insession).
Wouldn't you rather be "stateful" in your design too?
I can't wait till my new article on the topic gets posted up at DevX.
Thanks Philly!