The WhitebeamArchitecture comprises a stateless 'front-end' processor called the 'Presentation Engine'. This communicates via XML to backend application servers. The horse-power required to build the user interface is centred in the stateles Presentation Engine. Because the Presentation Engine is stateless a large number of these can be placed in front of - and share - a single application server. A stateless Presentation Engine means that simple load balancing can be performed to distribute load between these servers - there is no requirement for requests from on individual client to go to the same server.

Whitebeam can therefore simply and effecively scale from a single box containing Presentation Engine and templates all the way to a multi-server installation supporting thousands of sites on the same infrastructure.