Web framework for real time interaction and scability: Deployment of Meteor in SLAP

Abstract

In the past few years, particularly after JavaScript’s 2009 Node.js was added to the web development ecosystem, the latter has undergone very serious struc- tural changes in the way we develop, interact, and deploy applications. Meteor was created to ease application development and to provide real time inter- action out-of-the-box, without having to worry about socket programming to implement data updates in real time. This thesis departs from the assumption that, in conjunction with a project to develop a platform-as-a-service, comes the need to integrate different technologies to the list of compatible applications for deployment. Therefore, this project focuses on integrating Meteor inside a PaaS infrastructure, specifically into SLAP, addressing the problems related to communication between the Meteor application and Mongo database compo- nents. As a platform-as-a-service is meant to provide elasticity on-demand for applications running on the service, problems with regards to scalability also arise because of the need to provide session affinity to the load balancer, there- fore requiring a sharding policy that is consistent with those requirements. We conclude that in order to successfully deploy a Meteor application into SLAP, proper integration requires the proxification of TCP communication to a pro- prietary SLAP communication protocol.