A video of this talk held in Norwegian at Javazone 2014 can be seen here: https://vimeo.com/105879904
The tight platform coupling found in most common web publishing systems is a potential bottleneck for enterprise level availability requirements in large web properties. Using a separated publishing architecture with an enterprise CMS decoupled from its web servers can provide a range of advantages including the potential for extremely high availability and scalability.
While your business might have a non-religious attitude to technology platforms in general, many common web CMSes will limit you to using their preferred platform throughout your publishing architecture, and while it might be a good tool for the editorial staff this platform might not be the best choice for your organization overall or to provide the needed flexibility in regards to availability or scalability.
Using a loosely coupled CMS with a multi-platform architecture allows you to avoid such problems however. One option is the enterprise experience manager SDL Tridion which has a .NET based CMS for content editors but allow for publishing the dynamic web pages created through an application server of choice. This architecture provide many advantages such as the independent availability of the CMS and the web properties it handles, as well as being able to use open source java solutions for clustering while having an easy-to-use .NET-based user interface for content editors. This talk will give an overview of some benefits gained by such a combination of technology platforms by detailing the systems architecture for a major Norwegian web property as an example.
6. Content Management Content Publishing
MS SQL Cluster
Broker DB
Unix Servers
Windows IIS Server
Tridion
Content
Manager
Tridion CMS DB
MS SQL Server
Tridion Broker DB
Firewall
Cache Channel
Service (Java)
Java Web
Application
(Weblogic)
End User
Dynamic
Content
Rendered
Content
Update
Notification
Other data source
Content Distributer
(Tomcat)
File storage
Templates
& binaries
7. advantages of decoupled
content management
choice of technology platforms
less delivery overhead
more scalable architecture
increased security
better reliability and uptime
multiple content sources
8. coupling is not a binary state
Tight Loose
Personal
publishing
systems
.NET based
content
management
systems
Java based
content
management
systems
Enterprise
experience
management
platforms
Wordpress
Drupal
Django
EPiServer
SiteCore
eZ Publish
Movable Type
SDL Tridion
Adobe EM
Oracle WC
HP Teamsite
Umbraco
Escenic
Hippo CMS
Magnolia
The core feature of a web content management system is as the name implies to manage web content, which sounds quite simple. However commercial publishing involves multiple stakeholders and complex processes, so the systems have over time grown to support a large part of this publishing workflow.
With improvements to the World Wide Web and the rise of dynamic content, many content management systems also took on the role of publishing content since this was an easy way to enable the new dynamic features. This meant that many content management systems became tightly coupled with the neccesary publishing systems, which have had huge effects on many parts of the publishing systems software architecture.
For more on this see;
Decoupled Content Management 101: http://gadgetopia.com/post/7206
We need more loosely-coupled WCM offerings: http://www.realstorygroup.com/Blog/2599-We-need-more-loosely-coupled-WCM-offerings
Tight coupling is generally considered a bad thing and is a negative metric for software quality due to the detrimental effects it can have.
This is also true for Content Management Systems, and many issues can be avoided and advantages gained with a loosely coupled architecture.
So why are managing and publishing in web content management systems so often tightly coupled?
The differences between platforms often have a big influence on systems, but generally there exist several both small and large publishing systems for any technology platform you can mention. This shows that differences in the technologies are not critically important, and any platform should be able to support decoupled architectures!
Perhaps many CMS developers just are so used to the tight coupling that doing things differently haven’t occurred to them yet?
The uncoupling of content management from content presentation provides a host of advantages to commercial and enterprise level systems. One of the most visible are the selection of separate technology platforms for each task, which can enable the creation of more stable, secure, efficient and scalable architectures for content presentation.
Example architecture from a major Norwegian web property combining .NET and Java using the loosely coupled SDL Tridion CMS.
Part of the background for building this architecture was that the company had a large team of Java developers on staff, and didn’t want to incur the cost of retraining or replacing them. At the same time the .NET based Tridion Content Manager was considered much easier to learn and use for the editorial staff, and would reduce training costs for them. Because of these conflicting requirements the decoupling between content management and content publishing was a large contributing factor in the selectioni of SDL Tridion.
While the tightly coupled vs loosely coupled dichtomy might lead you to believe a system is either one or the other, there is actually a continuum between the two.
The degree to which systems are coupled appear to be connected to both the target audience and the underlying technology platform of the systems.
Nearly all personal publishing systems are very tightly coupled, especially the PHP-based ones which are almost exclusively used in a single server setup, such as Wordpress. A partial exception is the Perl based Movable Type when used in static publishing mode.
When looking at mid-tier commercial offerings most .NET systems are tightly coupled, with for instance EPiServer being more so than Escenic which at least seperates management and publishing runtimes. Java systems on the other hand often have a somewhat loosely coupled architecture, but even the commercial offerings rarely go all the way. Hippo CMS and Magnolia are among the few that can run in fully decoupled mode.
Among high end enterprise solutions however, most systems are loosely coupled regardless of technology.
This includes offerings such as SDL Tridion, Oracle WebCenter, Adobe Experience Manager and HP Teamsite.