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Re: Artima Design
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Posted: Dec 3, 2002 7:04 PM
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> I was curious if you would be willing to share any
> information regarding the design and implementation of
> your site. Is it built in Java, is it a commercial product
> or home grown and how does it perform under the current
> load.
>
Sorry, Eric. I somehow missed this post until now. This site first appeared in 1995, if I remember right. Back then it was just one page. Artima.com was primarily brochure-ware for a couple years, but then I started republishing my JavaWorld and other articles here.
In January, 1998, I added a discussion forum based on a perl script I got for free from Matt's Scripts Archives, which I believe contains scripts written by a then-high school student. I had to heavily hack that perl script, but it served for several years. I initially created the Design Forum and added one new topic once a month for each Design Techniques article I published in JavaWorld. I then added a Jini Forum for the same purpose when I started my Jiniology column in JavaWorld. In April 2000, I created the Java Answers Forum, because I was getting a lot of Java questions via email that I didn't have time to answer. I wanted the Java Answers Forum to be a place programmers could ask and answer each other's questions.
I had been adding content regularly, from FAQs to recommended books to links to resources to chapters from my JVM book and so on. As the site grew, it became harder and harder to manage as a bunch of files. While it was small, I just would write a perl (and later, python) script to make global to changes to all the files. So in I think the spring of 2001, I created a build system for the site. Each page has an XML descriptor file and a raw HTML file. These are all checked into CVS. I created a python scripts to generate makefiles and several Java apps that actually take the source files and pump out the built HTML. I am constantly tweaking and adding features to this build system in an effort to improve the usability of the site.
Last year (2001) it was becoming apparent that I had outgrown the perl CGI script that I was using for the forums, so I purchased a copy of Jive and spent a good six weeks integrating it into the site and the build system. I frankly had to fairly heavily hack Jive as well to add features I wanted and fix what I considered bugs. The old pre-Jive forum posts are now here:
http://www.artima.com/legacy/
So basically, just about all of Artima.com is homegrown other than the Jive API. In fact, I edit most everything, HTML and XML, by hand.
Performance is fine, other than my nagging problem with Tomcat crashing. I actually caught it doing so in a log file this weekend, so I have a bit more info finally to work with. I still don't have that problem nailed, but am very concerned about it and expect to have the problem solved soon. I've tried hard to make the pages simple for bandwidth, browsers, and the server. I'm only getting around 2,000,000 hits a month now, so really it isn't that overwhelming to the server. My main problem is just keeping Tomcat up reliably.
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