This sample illustrates how Boost can be integrated with a Web site to enable user-generated content (UGC) features.

Sites that support user-generated content like this are great for building and nourishing communities, but have traditionally come at high cost. Not only does the development and deployment require a significant investment of time and money, they also require ongoing maintenance and support. Highly successful sites also need to account for scalability and reliability as their user base and traffic load increase.

On the surface, this site might seem like a common video sharing site. However, a deeper look at its architecture reveals that it is actually made up of two major components: a hosting site and Boost services.

The hosting site is responsible for managing users and serving HTML. As part of its HTML, the site references the Boost JavaScript library and uses its APIs to request video data, which is pulled directly from Boost servers into the user’s browser. Once in the browser, embedded scripts process the retrieved data using templates to format and display the HTML for the user. As a result, the hosting site is able to offload all requests for video data and streaming. When users upload videos, they are even uploading directly to Boost, which means that the hosting site does not have to deal with that load either.

Some features, like posting videos or comments, require authentication with the Boost service. When site users invoke those features, it is up to the site owner to determine if they want to allow it. This demo requires that users log in to the site before they can perform those actions, but that is completely up to the site owner.

On a recent benchmarking load of the landing page of this sample, roughly 360KB of content was downloaded from servers (or from the local browser cache).

Of the above, virtually everything can be cached from page to page, with the exception of the Boost data, which should be refreshed on every page load. The benefit to site owners is that the majority of the load can be pushed off to Boost, resulting in a highly scalable and responsive site that requires a minimal amount of investment.

Most importantly, Boost provides an incredibly robust and flexible developer platform. Most sites can integrate Boost services in under 1 week, drastically reducing the time it takes to bring user-generated content features to existing sites.