Since we covered some of the key components of content management, independent
workflows and complex story relationships, we have to look at the other end
of publishing: delivery. Once we've defined our data and presentation, what
do we have handled by our delivery engine?
Many systems in use for solving publishing problems suffer from low
performance ceilings because the delivery system is going to a data store
(a RDBMS, an object database or some other lookup process) to fetch and
format. It's an accepted given that maintaining complex relationships between
editorial objects mandates storage in such a system, but why make the HTTP
request fulfillment performance hinge on retrieval? Doesn't it make more
sense to calculate in advance that which can be so that the HTTP server can
do what it does best, serve files?
Not all content components can be statically pre-calculated but if %90 of a
presentation only changes episodically, not on a per HTTP request basis, we
re-calculate %100 of the presentation on a per HTTP request basis?