Supporting industrial hyperwebs: lessons in scalability

Open hypermedia is one approach to managing the relationships that exist in software development projects. A key technical issue in this endeavor is support for scalability. Our experience supporting scalability in open hypermedia has revealed several key insights including the notion of the transitivity of scalability, the need to consider issues of scale in moving from design to implementation, the need to apply multiple techniques in tandem, and the unexpected nontechnical issues that arise when scaling a system to meet the demands of industrial software engineering. These insights are grounded in observations of a development project that scaled an open hypermedia system, Chimera, two orders of magnitude to meet the demands of an industrial user.