Preface

About this Work

My name is Benjamin Erb and I have been studying Media Informatics at Ulm University since 2006. This work represents a major requirement for the completion of my diploma course in 2012. For a long time, I have been taking a great interest in web technologies, scalable architectures, distributed systems and programming concurrency.

As a consequence, the topic of my thesis covers most of these interests. In fact, it considers the overlap of these subjects when it comes to the design, implementation and programming of scalable web architectures. I hope to provide a comprehensive introduction to this topic, which I have missed so far. As such a primer might also be interesting for many others, I am happy to release my thesis under a free license to the general public.

This thesis incorporates both academic research papers and practically orientated publications and resources. In essence, I aimed for a survey of different approaches from a conceptual and theoretical perspective. Hence, a quantitative benchmarking of concrete technologies was out of scope for my work. Also, the extents of the subjects brought up only allowed for a brief overview. The bibliography and the referenced resources provide a good starting point for further readings.

I am very interested in your feedback, your thoughts on the topic and your ideas! Feel free to contact me or get in touch with me via Twitter: @b_erb

Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to thank my advisor Jörg Domaschka for his steady and precious support. He gave me substantial liberties, but was always available for a lot of good advices and formative chit-chats when I needed them.

I also thank my supervisors, Prof. Dr. Hauck and Prof. Dr. Weber, especially for allowing me to work on such a conceptual and comprehensive topic for my thesis. After all, both of them need to be held responsible for my interests in these topics to some degree.

I want to thank all of my proofreaders—namely and alphabetically— Christian Koch, Katja Rogers, Linda Ummenhofer, Lisa Adams, Matthias Matousek, Michael Müller, Nicolai Waniek and Timo Müller. I also want to thank Jan Lehnardt and Lena Herrmann who reinforced my decision to release this thesis.

Finally, I want to say to everyone, who—directly or indirectly—helped me and supported me during the time I wrote this thesis: Thank you!