Our Application Server Stack

With a new year coming up I thought I would give a quick run down of our OS server stack.  From the beginning SpatialKey has been built on a number of great community/company open source platforms, here is what we currently use:

1. Apache/Tomcat
1. We are currently evaluating moving our application servers to pure Tomcat vs. JBoss as at this time we are not taking advantage of any of the additional server capabilities JBoss provides and Tomcat gives a smaller and more easily managed servlet container.
2. JBoss AS
1. Has been our application server platform from the beginning.  I cannot say enough good things about JBoss.  It is an outstanding full stack J2EE server.
3. Postgres SQL 9 + PostGIS
1. SpatialKey would not be what it is today without Postgres and PostGIS.  Postgres is a great enterprise ready database from the get-go, but add PostGIS to it and you have a powerful full stack GIS database on top of it.
4. Blaze DS
1. The SpatialKey client is flash under the hood and Flex developed.  Blaze DS is the glue that allows the flash client to request server services.
5. Server Development
1. There are really too many technologies to list here, but there are three to definitely point out:
1. Spring
1. Ah, Spring… the magic container that brings the whole SpatialKey server together.  Don’t leave home without it!
2. Hibernate
1. Going hand in hand with Spring, Hibernate gives us an industry standard object relational mapping engine to help with the heavy lifting of standard database interactions.  Everything non-customer data goes through Hibernate in SpatialKey.
3. Railo
1. I have always been a ColdFusion fan.  I have worked on ColdFusion since its very early days and to this day believe it is still the easiest web application server to develop for.  Railo brings ColdFusion development to the open source world and of course at no charge!

So, there you have it the open source server stack used in SpatialKey (did I mention all of this great server goodness is free??).  If anyone has any specific questions regarding our usage of these products, please ask them in the comments and I will be glad to answer any that I can.