Web and mobile applications today should be designed and built from the ground up to support international markets, unless there is a strong business case to restrict them to a single market. The availability of tools and frameworks to provide your application with international support (including multiple languages, currencies, locales, etc.) lowers the barrier for application development teams, but the technology build is only part of the challenge of supporting international markets. In Part 1 of this two part post, we look at the basics if international software, and how to plan your project to best support the demands of international applications.

When budgets are limited, web product owners can face a daunting task of deciding which SmartPhone device to support first. With market share changing so rapidly, this can be a difficult decision. We've pulled together some statistics on SmartPhone use to help with these kinds of choices.

As reported by the Real Story group, the latest Google Search Appliance (GSA 6.8) now has faceted search, amongst other things. We blogged on the GSA last year, noting how - although the GSA has some powerful features - its administrative interface and feed control were both somewhat lacking. It seems that the main new features are: faceted navigation, a SharePoint 2010 connector (useful for intranets), and Active-Active mirroring. How many of the glitches we found back in 2009 (such as poor ampersand handling, batch import control and index purging) are now fixed is not clear, although a side-effect of the new faceted navigation seems to be that the search result estimates are now accurate.

Two Priocept developers, Chris and Adam, went to Basel last week to get trained up as Magnolia developers. Here's a quick report-back.

The Twitter Engineering team (@twittereng) has just achieved an impressive 3x performance improvement for Twitter search queries, largely, it seems, by replacing Ruby-on-Rails web applications with new applications built on Java, coupled with a switch from MySQL to Lucene for the data store.

For standard document or page-centric indexing and search requirements in the enterprise, the Google Search Appliance performs very effectively, although more unusual uses may require customisation or addition of extra functionality to achieve the desired results, particularly around administration. Here, we provide details about the GSA, its usage, and relevant capabilities and limitations.

This post provides some much-needed clarity on the subject of HTTP server load, and demonstrates how to calculate the key metrics which allow system architects to plan capacity and estimate the scaling needed for a system.