A secure, cost-effective, and performance-optimized online social Web service

在已完成的Engage项目中，BridgingChin.ca的社交网站的初步版本是通过OAuth 2.0与新浪微博社交网站的接口构建的。目前正在测试中，在Bridge Chin.ca投入试运行并最终投入生产之前，还有几个重要的步骤。这些步骤围绕安全、托管和运营成本、性能、用户数据管理、记录和分析等问题展开。在这个后续项目中，我们首先致力于加强已开发的PHP和MySQL代码的安全性，以便对包括密码在内的用户信息进行高度加密和保护，并能够检测和处理对数据库的恶意攻击，如SQL注入。其次，将对专用服务器、租用虚拟主机和云计算进行详细的成本分析。特别是，将详细研究通过Amazon EC2、Rackspace以及可能的其他云提供商对前端服务器以及后端数据库的自动伸缩机制，以将公司运营成本降至最低。第三，将在页面下载和数据库查询速度方面进行多项优化，以减少响应时间。最后，将结合详细的数据分析、日志和同步功能，处理用户数据的分析和清理，在测试服务器、中间服务器和备份服务器之间自动移动和同步数据。目标是继续修复当前版本代码中发现的问题，以建立一个与生产质量相匹配的安全、成本效益高和高性能的网站。

In the completed Engage project, a preliminary version of the social networking website for bridgingchina.ca was constructed with interface to Sina Microblog social networking site via OAuth 2.0. Currently under testing, several important steps remain before bridgingchina.ca can be taken into staging and eventually into production. These steps are centered around the issues of security, hosting and operational cost, performance, user data management, logging and analysis. In this continued project, we first aim to strengthening the security of the developed PHP and Mysql code so that the user information including password are strongly encrypted and protected and that malicious attacks to the database such as SQL injections can be detected and handled. Second, detailed cost analysis will be conducted to compare between dedicated servers, rented virtual hosts and cloud computing. Especially, the autoscaling mechanism of frontend servers as well as backend database via Amazon EC2, rackspace and possibly other cloud providers will be studied in detail to minimize the company operational cost. Third, several optimizations regarding page download and database query speed will be conducted to reduce the response time. Finally, detailed data analysis, logging and synchronization functions will be incorporated to handle the user data analysis and cleaning, move and synchronize data automatically between the testing server, staging server, and backup server. The objective is to continue to fix the problems found in the current version of code to build a secure, cost-effective and high performance website that matches production quality.