Scalable and Efficient Web Application Architectures : Thin-clients and SQL vs. Thick-clients and NoSQL

Modern Web applications have lately seen an increase of popular Web 2.0 patterns, such as user-participation and rich user-interfaces. These applications require highly dynamic page generation techniques and flexible and efficient database solutions. At the same time, an increase in JavaScript engines in modern Web browsers has lead to the development of many new and exciting Web application architectures. In this thesis, we investigate such a modern Web application architecture and compare it with a traditional architecture. We define the modern approach as thick-client JavaScript architectures that incorporate NoSQL database technologies, while the traditional approach is thin-client architectures that uses SQL database technologies. The results were that the modern approach is both more scalable, efficient, in terms of response times, and the NoSQL solution is more flexible because of its simplified programming model. However, there are issues with the modern approach, in which some principles from the traditional architecture should be preserved