A UNIFIED RESOURCE PLATFORM FOR THE RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF SCALABLE WEB APPLICATIONS

This thesis presents Web Utility Kit (WUT): a platform that helps to simplify the process of creating modern web applications. It addresses the need to simplify the web development process through the creation of a hosted service that provides access to a unified set of resources. The resources are made available through a variety of protocols and formats to help simplify their consumption. It also provides a uniform model across all of its resources making multi-resource development an easier and more familiar task. WUT saves the time and cost associated with deployment, maintenance, and hosting of the hardware and software in which resources depend. It has a relatively low overhead averaging 123 ms per request and has been shown capable of linear scaling with each application server capable of handling 120+ requests per minute. This important property of being able to seamlessly scale to developer's needs helps to eliminate the expensive scaling process. Initial users of the platform have found it to be extremely easy to use and have paved the way for future developments.