Writing scalable applications

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms810434.aspx

http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/scaling/overview.html
* Minimizing work - Retrieve objects/entities by key, key name, or ID, Paging results, read / write sparsely
* Paging through large datasets
* Avoiding datastore contention
* Sharding counters
* Effective memcache

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163854.aspx#S4
Performance on the Data Tier
Tip 1—Return Multiple Resultsets
Tip 2—Paged Data Access
Tip 3—Connection Pooling
Tip 4—ASP.NET Cache API
Tip 5—Per-Request Caching
Tip 6—Background Processing
Tip 7—Page Output Caching and Proxy Servers
Tip 8—Run IIS 6.0 (If Only for Kernel Caching)
Tip 9—Use Gzip Compression
Tip 10—Server Control View State
Conclusion

http://www.javaperformancetuning.com/tips/design.shtml#REF2

J2EE Patterns
MVC http://java.sun.com/blueprints/patterns/MVC-detailed.html
http://java.sun.com/blueprints/patterns/catalog.html