LONDON — Oracle and Akamai have joined forces to define a “standard to facilitate the accelerated delivery of dynamic Web sites on the edge.” The collaboration has resulted in the Edge Side Includes (ESI) specification, an XML –based markup to define the sections of a Web page that will be assembled dynamically at the edge – that is to say on one of over ten thousand servers that Akamai has situated on its distributed network.
The aim of the standard is to streamline the delivery of dynamic Web pages so that end-users are able to view pages more quickly, and to save time and money for content publishers by giving them a simple, rule-based system to correctly tag information so that it can be recognised, cached and assembled by servers on Oracle 9i Application Server and the Akamai Network, through its EdgeSuite whole site content delivery service.
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Akamai’s EdgeSuite takes the company’s FreeFlow content delivery service one stage further. FreeFlow lifted the “heavy” objects from websites, such as graphics and rich media, which can slow down a page’s appearance online, and then delivered them to the optimal point on the Akamai Network, whereas EdgeSuite does this with an entire site. This allows static and database-driven pages to overcome the traffic bottlenecks that can be experienced on the Net, resulting in faster website performance.
As Ian King, Akamai General Manager for Northern Europe, puts it, “The Internet is not optimally designed for what we want it to do: it’s not always good at moving large amounts of information, and often gets blocked at certain points, resulting in a white screen and a 404 error or slow performanceWith over 10,500 servers, Akamai can offer a massively distributed deployment of servicesand finds the optimal server from which to serve you with the requested information.”
EdgeSuite costs between #10,000 a month and 100,000 poounds a month, depending on a site’s particular needs, and according to King results in a between five and ten times improvement in performance. In tandem with Oracle 9i Application Server, the two companies consider that “an integrated solution for developing, deploying and accelerating mission-critical Web applications globally” can be provided.
