Jago de Vreede

Building a large scale, cloud hosted, multi device product that changes the way students are taught in high schools, turns out to be not entirely trivial. We have been building PulseOn for the last two years. We faced many technical challenges, and have tried many different technologies. Some ideas turned out to be extremely helpful, some other ideas that looked promising turned out to be bad practices.

In this talk we will discuss what we have learned about building modular, scalable web applications. We will go into different areas of the technology stack, from storage and (nosql) databases to a modular RESTful backend and a multi device HTML5 based frontend. We will also go into the cloud, and discuss topics such as auto scaling and failover. We will discuss what works and what doesn’t, and hopefully help other to make the right decisions.

Some topics that we will touch upon:

• Modular architecture with OSGi
• Failing at linked data and semantic databases
• Using MongoDB from OSGi
• Release process and semantic versioning
• Continuous deployment
• JavaScript frameworks