Thursday, December 22, 2011

ATG-Search : Ideal Production Environment for an e-commerce site


A production setup is normally an alien environment to normal developers. On top of the e-commerce site setup locally, a few patch ups needs to be done to work in the production environment or rather there are large differences. Before going into the details of a production scenario a few important things needs to be brought into your attention; Content Administration (CA), Search Indexer, and electronic Store front. CA is Content or data related thing, the ATG CA lets the product data and other data flow into our website.


 The need of a CA in a retail website is due the frequent change of data and the changes are to be done by the business itself not a database administrator. Search module of the website is clubbed to CA because it is also a portion which needs frequent business intervention. The search administration and merchandising modules are kept as part of the CA ear in a seperate server(Server1). The search indexer which does the indexing is kept in another server(Server-2), this server will have the indexing engine(ATGSearch.exe) in it. 


The index files generated will be put into a folder which is accessible to the answer servers as well. An answer server(AS-1,2,3) is a server which caters to the requests coming from the front end or the consumer side. For eg: a customer enter the webaddress, visits the website, he want to buy a TV, he searches for it, the search requests will be routed to different answer servers for load balancing. This is done through a routing module. The answer servers will look into the index files which is deployed in the shared folder.


The Search Indexer does all the indexing jobs create the .IDX and .STG files. The estore servers(Server-3 & 4) caters the store related requests. Each of the estore servers has many number of instances to handle large number of customer requests.

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