Ramas home page Technology and social writings. What if I were to tell you that the e commerce site youve been developing could be hosted on a static website that would offer it premier performance Or that the document management system could be run on any plain, old static server like Apache, nginx Stick with me and well explore this topic. This information may be too basic for advanced developers, but for most managers, this introduction may be long overdue. A bit of history. Long ago, most websites were static. Kilauea Mount Etna Mount Yasur Mount Nyiragongo and Nyamuragira Piton de la Fournaise Erta Ale. Search or upload videos. Popular on YouTube Music, Sports, Gaming, Movies, TV Shows, News, Spotlight. Browse Channels. When I was a student at IIT Madras, my dream place to work was Bell Labs. Eventually, after a PhD, I ended up there. One of the preliminaries was getting a phone. All they served were pages html, text, and images. Hyperlinks allowed us to navigate from one page to another. Most were content rich websites containing information, entertainment, and photos. Now it seems unthinkable that clicking on the hyperlinks was the only way to interact with the sites. As shown in the picture, the protocol between the web server and the user is fixed http protocol. The way the webserver interacts with backend information in the case of static web, it is html, css, js, images and such is up to us. Ultra Focus Keygen Youtube Downloader' title='Ultra Focus Keygen Youtube Downloader' />A static website serves this information straight out of the file system. As the readers began wanting to navigate sites in interesting ways or interact by adding content with the websites like comments, we began to need server side programming. Serving out of a file system wont do. The application needs to understand complex requests and somehow use the information in the files or databases to serve the information. Since database is a popular choice to keep structured information, web started serving as interfaces to the database types of simple crud operations. In fact, applications like php. My. Admin even let people manage the databases on the web. Coming back to the web applications I mentioned, e commerce, digital marketing, document management systems all these websites are considered interactive, dynamic, and programmable, and therefore need a web application server. The moment you choose one platform typically it means an app server, a language, a framework, a set of libraries, youre stuck with it forever. Lets see how we can design our way out. Static web with automated look and feel support. Let us consider a simple case of information presentation. In this setup, all the consumers want to do is read the information. In that case, why not stick to a static website We can. The advantages are obvious. First and foremost, a static website is simple. Verb Forms List With Gujarati Meaning Pdf Files. It does not require any moving parts. Any old webserver can serve static content. You can even run a static website, with a simple one liner in Python python m. Simple. HTTPServer in Python 2. It is also incredibly fast. The server has to simply send pages it does not have to do any other computation. As such, it can be sped up even more by caching the content locally, or even using CDN content delivery networks. You can use special purpose webservers such as nginx, that are optimized for serving static content too. Furthermore, it is simple to maintain. You can back it up in the cloud, move to a different provider, and even serve it from your own desktop. You do not need to back up a database or worry about software upgrades, portability issues, or even support. But, what are the downsides Let us consider the problems How do you create nice looking pagesLet us say that you want to create a standard look and feel. If you are the kind that use hand coded HTML, you will cut and paste the HTML template and then edit it. Pretty soon, it becomes complex. If you want to change the look and feel, you will have to go through all the pages and edit the few lines. How do you create standard elements of a website For example, you want a menu scheme. If you add a new area, then you have to go to each page and add a link in the menu to this new area of website. Or, if you want to create a sitemap, you will find yourself constantly updating the sitemap. Considering that a website has repetitive information depending on the context, static way of maintaining a website is cumbersome. That is why, even for the static websites, people prefer Word. Press, Joomla, or Drupal all of which are meant for dynamically creating websites. In these systems of dynamic content generation, the content is generated based on the request. No matter what application you use, it will have following issues The application becomes slow The server needs to execute the program to generate a page and serve the page. Blue Label Serial Number Check on this page. Compare it to the earlier scenario where the server merely had to read the file from the file system and serveIn fact, the server can even cache it, if the file doesnt change often. The application becomes complex All the flexibility of combining content with the themes based on configuration comes at a price. The application server has to do many things. Consider the following full description of the stack. Any web server that is generating pages dynamically, needs to depend on an execution engine. It can be an engine that interprets a language, or executes a binary. For any language, we need a framework. For instance, if we are using Javascript, we can use Express as the framework. This framework can do many things. At a bare minimum, it can route the calls that is, it interprets any request and maps the request to the right response. Next, it needs to have libraries that deal with writing the logic to actually manipulate the data. To present the data, we need a templating engine. Of course, you have fancy names like Model the data, view the templates etc, and the controller the routing for this kind of framework MVC. The problem with any stack is that once you are committed to it, it is incredibly difficult to change it. To make matters worse, the frameworks that let you start easily for example, lot of php based frameworks are not the best frameworks for enterprise strength requirements like say Java, which is excellent in libraries that deal with lot of integration. Ask Facebook They started with Php and had to lot of optimizations to get the performance they want. How can we do better Can we still use the static website, and support better usability of the website Reduce the costs of maintenance The answer is yes. If we were to separate the content generation and content delivery, we can get best of the both worlds. From this activity, what did we gain We gained performance The runtime has to serve static files, giving us several different options to improve the performance. We gained simplicity, somewhat Technically, it is possible to mix and match different systems of generation which is somewhat like using different languages and compiling down to machine code. Readers can observe that content delivery networks can do this job of caching generated content on the fly, giving us the illusion of static generation of content. Static website generators. If we are going to generate static website, what options do we haveLet us see the alternatives. Firstly, we can use the same dynamic content generators and dump out the entire site in static pages. That is, if we are using Drupal, we can dump all the nodes. Or, with Word. Press, or any other content management site. The challenge is, what if there is no unique URL for a contentLot of content management sites offer multiple ways of accessing the static content. For example, Lotus notes was notorious for such URL generation. Then, the static content dumping can be difficult.