Building websites that don't require recompilation upon changes

[Obsoleet]

I don't know much about web development, but have worked in .Net shops that push dlls and other updated files to sites. This causes lengthy site rebuilds within IIS.

What are technologies that avoid this sort of process? Say you want to provide a CMS or other website and want to eliminate downtime related to this sort of process? Hot code swapping essentially such as Erlang, but suitable for webwork. Doing some reading it also seems Django supports this type of update.

What other platforms/languages support this?

 

[Ken g6]

Drupal does this in many cases. If you're just changing PHP code, there's no need for downtime. Though it's suggested to back up your database when sending changes from a development site to a production site, which does require downtime. Database updates (adding/changing/deleting tables or columns) require downtime as well.

 

[Munashiimaru]

When I was working with IIS (using c#/aspx and old code was vb/asp), pages were compiled on first use so things compiled on the fly. When all of our servers but production were dead, I used to edit the production pages directly : p I don't know what distinguishes that to happen though.

 

[Train]

It is possible to do on the fly compilation in ASP.Net, but it is not recommended.

You have to set up your app as a web site, not a web app. Subtle difference, but allows you to drop single pages or code files in without having to push DLL's

There is no gain in doing this though, if your builds & deployments are taking a long time, perhaps it's better to figure out why instead of just avoiding them. Each page will still have to be built at some point, just now it will be done on the first request, adding uneeded delay.

The app I am currently working on has about 50k lines of code, yet we can deploy the entire thing to the live server in about 5 seconds (after it is uploaded) Even people who happen to request a page within that 5 seconds usually dont get a fail message, as IIS just waits until it can handle the request.

 

[Leros]

I work on webapps that run on Apache/Tomcat. We always have at least two instances of a webapp server. Even if we don't have a large enough load to warrant two servers, we'll have a second server running for failover purposes.

When we deploy a new version of the app, we take down one instance, upgrade it, bring it back up, then do the same with the next server.