Chapter 12 -- Designing Scalable Applications

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Chapter 12

Throughout this book, you've seen a lot of detail about COM and COM+. Because this is the final chapter of the book, this is my last opportunity to put everything in perspective. Knowing the details is important, but it's equally important to see how all the little pieces fit together. How do you take all the things you've learned in this book and deploy an application that scales to fit your needs? In this chapter, I'll present a few physical deployment models and consider their implications for scalability.

Another theme of this chapter is how to select the best protocol for the job at hand. As a COM+ developer, your arsenal includes DCOM, HTTP, and MSMQ. Each protocol has its share of strengths and weaknesses. You must understand each one's capabilities if you want to avoid painting yourself into a corner.

I'll also describe techniques for passing data across the network. Passing data from and to the server is an essential aspect of any distributed application. I'll conclude the chapter with a few words on miscellaneous issues such as passing updatable recordsets and caching data in the middle tier.