CS848 Paper Review Form - Fall 2006

Paper Title: A scalability service for dynamic web applications. 

Author(s): Christopher Olston, Amit Manjhi, Charles Garrod, Anastassia Ailamaki, Bruce M. Maggs, and Todd C. Mowry 

1) Is the paper technically correct?
 [Y] Yes
 [ ] Mostly (minor flaws, but mostly solid)
 [ ] No

2) Originality
 [ ] Very good (very novel, trailblazing work)
 [Y] Good 
 [ ] Marginal (very incremental)
 [ ] Poor (little or nothing that is new)

3) Technical Depth
 [ ] Very good (comparable to best conference papers)
 [Y] Good (comparable to typical conference papers)
 [ ] Marginal depth
 [ ] Little or no depth

4) Impact/Significance
 [ ] Very significant
 [Y] Significant
 [ ] Marginal significance.
 [ ] Little or no significance.

5) Presentation
 [ ] Very well written
 [Y] Generally well written
 [ ] Readable
 [ ] Needs considerable work
 [ ] Unacceptably bad

6) Overall Rating
 [ ] Strong accept (very high quality)
 [Y] Accept (high quality - would argue for acceptance)
 [ ] Weak Accept (marginal, willing to accept but wouldn't argue for it)
 [ ] Weak Reject (marginal, probably reject)
 [ ] Reject (would argue for rejection)

7) Summary of the paper's main contribution and rationale
   for your recommendation. (1-2 paragraphs)

The paper presents a scalability service offered as a plug-in service for dynamic web
 applications. The service can be used by multiple organizations based on need. The central
 idea of the design is achieved by replicating all three tiers of traditional mult-itier 
models in proxy servers with a scalable consistency enforcement mechanism for strong data 
consistency. The paper also discusses some alternative strategies for invalidating cached 
data in response to update notifications as well as the consideration for balancing the 
tradeoff between scalablity and secrecy.


The paper is good because it is well written and clear about its ideas. It presents the 
ongoing work in a way showing that the work is reasonable sound and feasible with 
performance evaluations, and provides a good discussion for consistency issues.



8) List 1-3 strengths of the paper.  (1-2 sentences each,
identified as S1, S2, S3.)

S1: Well organized logically, easy to understand yet with enough theoretical depth.


S2: Has done seminal work on exploring the feasibility of using multicast for distributed 
data consistency mechanism. 



9) List 1-3 weaknesses of the paper (1-2 sentences each,
identified as W1, W2, W3.)

W1: Not enough discussion about secrecy requirements and corresponding strategies needed as 
well as the influences imposed by those extra strategies.


W2: Not enough discussion on group subscription management and conflicts management for 
concurrent updates.


W3: Not enough fault tolerance issue discussion, for example, missing updates, etc.


10) Detailed comments for authors.