Questions and Answers
What if Parts Depot has a million parts, will there be a million static pages? For example:
http://www.parts-depot/parts/000000
http://www.parts-depot/parts/000001
http://www.parts-depot/parts/999999
We need to distinguish between a logical and a physical URL. The above URLs are logical. They
express what resource is desired. They do not identify a physical object. The advantage of using
logical URLs is that changes to the underlying implementation of the resource will be transparent to
clients (that's loose coupling!).
Quite likely Parts Depot will store all parts data in a database. Code at the Parts Depot web site will
receive each logical URL request, parse it to determine which part is being requested, query the database,
and generate the part response document which is returned to the client.
Contrast the above logical URLs with these physical URLs:
http://www.parts-depot/parts/000000.html
http://www.parts-depot/parts/000001.html
http://www.parts-depot/parts/999999.html
These URLs are clearly pointing to physical (HTML) pages. If there are a million parts it will not be
very attractive to have a million static pages. Furthermore, changes to how these parts data is
represented will result in impact all clients that were using the old representation. So, no, there will
not be a million static pages.