Sometime back the technical consultant of a customer accused me of having created a ‘weird architecture’ for her project. And this after we had completed an iteration that met agreed goals, work which was commended by the customer as ‘brilliant’.
This was a Web 2.0 application, built on the ASP.NET framework, written in C# and targeted the .NET Framework 3.5, with a SQL Server 2005 database, and hosted on IIS 6.0.
So what was ‘weird’?
The project consisted of several web applications and was deployed on the IIS in the manner shown in Figure 1. A web site was created and web applications were deployed as virtual directories under this web site.
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| Figure 1 |
A separate Application Pool was created for this web site, as indicated in Figure 2.
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| Figure 2 |
From the above example, Application1 could be accessed from the URL http://www.myapplication.com/Application1 and so on.
In the past few years, I have come across several applications which have been or will be deployed in this manner. What was/is the motivation for deploying the applications in this manner?
We analyse this through a couple of case studies. Read the analysis here.
