Leaf Project - A book streaming platform : Infrastructure

Sammanfattning: During the 21st century, humans have begun to have digital books and use in digital form most of their information, be this: image, sound, or printed materials. Some of these efforts have had great success. For images, the new digital cameras brought lots of new features, such as reduced physical size, higher quality, and error correction. For sound, digital music enables digital distribution, ease of sharing, and large amounts of storage. But, despite the recent efforts by Internet companies and publishers, the book industry has resisted success in the digital era. Today, new technologies enable us to distribute digital books. However, these digitised books are still represented in a traditional: as text and static images. However, our project is based on the believe that ones reading experience can evolve and benefit from current technology. The "Leaf" project's main objective is to create an electronic publication distribution platform that can equally satisfy publishers, writers, and readers. The project will create an environment to distribute digital publications that support more advanced technologies, providing in the future something beyond text and static images to the reader. This document describes the different aspects of design of an information technology infrastructure designed to stream electronic publications. This part of the "Leaf" projects aims to describe the necessary information technology infrastructure needed as an electronic publication distribution platform. The main purpose of this infrastructure is to serve electronic publications on-line to readers; however, that is not the only objective for this infrastructure. It has to deliver a service that should be highly scalable. This architecture should include database and directory servers to support the main services. All the auxiliary services should support the aim of the project , i.e., to serve amounts of traffic in a scalable and highly manageable way, while utilising open standards. The first chapter reviews the state of the art in electronic publication. The document continues in chapter 3 with an analysis of each of the different servers involved in the architecture. The Apache web server is used as streaming book service, the OpenLDAP is used to implement the authentication server. The last section nishes with a discussion of the database server. Chapter 4 describes the performance tests to verify that the propose solution meets the requires set of the system. The "Leaf" project infrastructure has been designed and all the involved services implemented successfully delivering a future possible infrastructure for the book "streaming" services. Moreover, the obtained knowledge will help to create the rst steps in the project infrastructure. The performance test unveil that the Varnish web accelerator is a cheap and powerful solution to improve the web server performance.