Living.com chose ATG's commerce application and personalization server, including the Dynamo application server, because it combines a lot of functionality in one package and is written using Java servlets for cross-platform portability. "One of the nice things about it is that the complete Java development environment can be deployed under NT, so if tomorrow I wanted to move the entire operation from Solaris to NT or AIX, I could do it without changing a single line of code," says Andrew Kass, technology director for Living.com.

The Internet home-furnishing retailer's site, which went online this summer, runs ATG's software-- including its Dynamo application server and an Oracle8 cluster-- under Solaris. While performance was a concern, Kass cites the completeness of the solution, its code portability, and its robustness. Dynamo plugs into Microsoft's Internet Information Server, Netscape's Web servers, and Apache, using ISAPI, NSAPI, or an Apache module. The module includes built-in load balancing and failover capability, which makes it easy to scale the site by simply adding more machines. "My Web servers are relatively low-powered Sun Ultra Enterprise 250s," he says. "The good thing about our architecture is that we can use multiple inexpensive boxes instead of large, expensive ones."

Dynamo uses its own proprietary scripting language, which has caching, but Kass developed advanced caching mechanisms to supplement those in Dynamo. "We bring in whole customized data segments from the database," he says "If I want to do computations on the results of some database operations, I can cache those as well."

Living.com is ambitious, to say the least. It wants to become the pre-eminent consumer brand for creating the home environment, says Kass. This means it will eventually sell things such as housewares, linens, rugs, wall coverings, accessories, kitchen equipment--anything that is inside or outside the home.

While custom coding was required in 1996 because adequate commercial tools weren't available, better commercial and open-source tools can now be found. "We recently sat down and looked at the latest technologies and realized that we could greatly increase performance and what the hardware could handle," says Todd Marshall, senior developer for Semaphore Corp., an Internet development and consulting company.

Marshall, who recently designed a data-collection site for Evaluations Research, an online market research company, has been developing a large music portal for the past four years. Leaning heavily toward open-source solutions, he evaluated several technologies and chose PHP, an open-source application server, as the new engine for the site. PHP, he found, was three to four times faster than Java servlet technology. Part of the performance gain is because PHP builds as a module directly into the Apache Web server. Marshall also uses the freely available GNU C compilers, GCC and GCC++, to build most of the site. Marshall uses Java for back-end commerce functions that can't be accomplished using PHP.

The music site, which should go online next month, runs on Solaris 7 with the Oracle8 database and Apache Web server on dual-processor Intel boxes. The decision to go with Solaris instead of Linux on the Intel boxes was about reliability, not speed. "We could get better results with Linux," says Marshall, "but Oracle for Linux has only been around for six months, so you don't have the maturity and stability there like you have on Solaris."

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Illustration by Jane Marinsky/SIS