Development and Security for Distributed Web Sites
By John Stewart
In my October 2000 column, I introduced five main challenges that developers and administrators face when creating a distributed Web site: content management, content distribution, distributed monitoring, site development, and security models. In the December issue, the second article in this series discussed difficulties of content management and distribution, and presented various products and methods for handling these tasks. This third installment focuses on site development and the need to alter security models before a site is ready to be rolled out.
Site development is the process and technology that creates, stages, and deploys new content and software. Distributed sites have different staging and testing needs from sites served from a single machine. Those needs depend greatly on each site's structure, and are reflected in the procedures and technologies they use.
Security models for Web sites are frequently written with the understanding that the Web site is run on systems within the enterprise, in one location, and on equipment owned by the company. Distributed sites require radical changes from the traditional security model.
Site Development
In the design of nondistributed, or centralized, sites, the process flow from development to production follows the stages shown in
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