Latest News from AJAX & RIA Journal

What's New in HTML5

Tue, 08 May 2012 08:00:00 EDT

HTML5 is changing the enterprise mobility industry. Just look at what SAP announced over the past month. They announced partnerships with 3 of the leading HTML5 SDK (software development kit) companies. These partnerships are to help SAP users quickly create HTML5 mobile apps that work with and connect to SUP (Sybase Unwired Platform), which is the standard SAP defined integration layer between mobile apps and backend SAP systems. In addition, SAP already has partnerships with companies like ClickSoftware that have an HTML5 solution called ClickMobile Professional.

What's New in HTML5

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:07:00 EDT

SAP has become a big advocate of HTML5 for enterprise mobility. Many of their recently announced partnerships with mobile vendors include strong endorsements of HTML5. I also see HTML5 playing a very important role for mobile applications developed in house. It is very hard to justify creating native applications for all platforms when you are only distributing the mobile apps internally. The economies of scale that mobility vendors can receive, are often not possible when developing for internal customers. Information visualization firm Periscopic has worked on a number of HTML5 sites developed for the iPad. They found that switching from Flash to HTML5 was not as bad as they feared.

Google Atmosphere on Tour in Seattle

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 11:00:00 EDT

The web is fundamentally changing the way we work – is your company ready? Intrigued by how more than 4 million businesses are using Google’s cloud to work in the future? Join us in Seattle on May 15 as we bring Google's highly anticipated annual gathering of business leaders together to hear: Industry experts shed light on emerging business models Customers share stories of business transformation Our product experts unveil new products Our executives answer your questions

Be Your Own Enterprise Mobile Apps Powerhouse with HTML5

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:28:00 EDT

ReadWriteWeb published SAP Plans to Dominate Enterprise Mobile Apps with HTML5 and New Partnerships article a few days ago. SAP acquired a mobile development firm Syclo and also announced important partnerships with Appcelertaor, Adobe (PhoneGap) and Sencha to become “…most powerful enterprise mobile developers in the world”. Most enterprise or business apps are content or data-driven. More and more enterprise expose their data, content and resources via REST API services and these apps consume that data. This is the next evolution of client/server architecture or more precise, the new mobile-cloud shift. Basicially, you got a mobile app talking connected to cloud-based REST API resources. HTML5 or hybrid (PhoneGap) mobile apps are the perfect fit here.

What's New in HTML5

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 09:00:00 EDT

HTML5 based ads are gaining on Flash. For ads that will be seen on mobile devices, developers are focusing on HTML5. Systems management and monitoring firm DN2K is turning to HTML5. It announced that HTML5 is now, “one of its core technologies in its business and industrial application platform”. ChronoZoom is a new HTML5-based web application developed by Microsoft Research, Russia's Moscow State University, and UC Berkeley. The site uses mixed media to let visitors visualize the universe.

dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.6 Now Supports Firefox 11

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:18:00 EDT

With the new release of the dynaTrace AJAX Edition you have Beta support for the Firefox 11 browser and therefore you can test the performance of your Web sites with the latest available Browsers from Mozilla and Microsoft. The AJAX Edition now supports Firefox 10, 11 and Internet Explorer 8, 9! To help you prepare for the future we added Internet Explorer 10 (developer preview). If you also take care of the legacy browsers and automated browser testing, you should take a look at the dynaTrace AJAX Edition Premium which helps you to guarantee a good performance for legacy, current and future browsers.

What's New in HTML5

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:41:00 EDT

When it comes to mobile HTML5 performance, Apple’s iOS platform far surpasses the Android, according to a recent study from Spaceport. The TeamLab Document Editor, which is the first online HTML5 word processor, makes use of all the HTML5 features, according to developer Ascensio System SIA. Adobe has introduced Shadow, a new tool for the inspection and preview of customized websites for mobile devices. The HTML5 friendly tool allows developers to “remotely control and inspect Web pages in multiple phones and tablets simultaneously.”

What's New in HTML5

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:37:00 EDT

HTML5 offers some genuine advantages and tools for developers, but it is not mature enough to serve as a tool for business applications, according to David Akka of Magic Software. The basics of establishing user location with HTML5 are covered in this tutorial from developerdrive.com. The iPad 2 ranks as the best device for HTML5 games and apps performance, according to a new report from spaceport.io. Overall, iOS devices and browsers outperformed Android “across the board.”

What's New in HTML5

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:38:00 EST

Each week I conduct market research on HTML5 and its impact on enterprise mobility and post the best of the articles I find here with a brief synopsis. I hope you find it useful and interesting. Google has launched two new HTML5-powered apps for offline reading of documents, one for the Chrome browser and one for Android. The upcoming BlackBerry 10 OS will include HTML5 support.

dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.5 Delivers Beta Support for IE 10 and Firefox 10

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:21:00 EST

With the new release of the dynaTrace AJAX Edition you have beta support for the Firefox 10 browser and can test the performance of your websites with the latest available browsers from Mozilla and Microsoft. The new dynaTrace AJAX Edition also helps you prepare for the future. With support for the Internet Explorer 10 developer preview you’re now able to start testing the performance of your website before Microsoft releases its new browser. However, you are not only testing the performance of the latest browsers – to test the web performance of legacy browsers take a look at the dynaTrace AJAX Edition Premium, which helps guarantee a good performance for legacy, current and future browsers.

Amazon Goes After Enterprise Data

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST

Amazon’s cloud, which, let’s face it, is still pretty much developer turf, broadened its push into the enterprise Wednesday with the introduction of AWS Storage Gateway, a beta virtual appliance nominally meant to automate enterprise data backup to S3 while creating a comfort level with the cloud among the leery. It’s the first time Amazon has proposed putting its own software on the ground inside a corporate data center. And the stuff’s targeted at large corporations. Amazon says some customers asked for such a solution. It also expects resellers to offer the service. It is of course proprietary and a competitive problem for other cloud storage and gateway suppliers. Come to think of it, Amazon as repository of corporate data is a problem for a lot of people.

What's New in HTML5

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:27:00 EST

Each week I conduct market research on HTML5 that includes news, quotes, market growth and developments around HTML5 and share the more interesting ones here with you. I hope you find it useful. A new survey from Evans Data shows that 43 percent of developers in North America and 58% in the Asia Pacific region are using HTML5. The trend is expected to grow even further in 2012. Read Original Content CEO of web framework and tool provider Sencha, Michael Mullany, states “Looking at the phenomenal rise of HTML5 as the next industry standard for Web development, it's clear that 2011 has been a transformational year for this powerful set of Web technologies.”

Internet Explorer 9 & Firefox 8/9 Support with dynaTrace Ajax Edition 3.4

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:30:00 EST

After announcing support for Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 8 and 9 in dynaTrace AJAX Edition Premium we now also provide support for the latest versions in the dynaTrace AJAX Edition. The latest version of dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.4 therefore gives you full JavaScript, AJAX, Network and Rendering analysis support for Mozilla Firefox 8 and 9 as well as Internet Explorer 8 and 9. You can also check out the Release Notes for a more detailed description of the enhancements.

SmartBear Software Advances Load Testing for Websites with RIAs

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 06:00:00 EST

SmartBear Software has unveiled LoadComplete 2.0, the latest version of the company's load testing tool for Web applications. Featuring new support for rich Internet applications (RIAs), LoadComplete 2.0 now makes it easy to create and run realistic load tests, without scripting, for websites built using Adobe Flash and Flex, AJAX, and Microsoft Silverlight technologies. New data presentation and reporting options make it easier for users to control data parameters and interpret and diagnose results to improve the performance, reliability, and user experience of Web applications. Mathijs Groen, QA Engineer, Benelux, at Kewill B.V., said, "LoadComplete 2.0 is an economical and efficient tool for us to more easily test the performance of our rich Internet-based applications and compare performance statistics by running it on several types of application servers. This enables us to better assist customers by providing them with the most ‘smoothly running' framework."

Adobe to Restructure, Let 750 Go - UPDATE

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:00:00 EST

Adobe said Tuesday that it’s going to restructure and let 750 people in North America and Europe go, 7% of its workforce, to focus on products that create digital content on multiple devices and platforms and digital marketing. In other words, its newfangled Creative Cloud, due out next year, and the Omniture-Demdex-Auditude side of the business. “Our mission is to produce the world’s content and maximize the impact of that content,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said in a statement. Adobe will cut its investment in enterprise software. It’s reportedly shutting down remote US development locations and getting ready to move more of the next release of Creative Suite (CS) development to India and China, suggesting that the sunset of Flash as we know it is commencing. Flash will be replaced by HTML 5 helped along by Adobe’s recent acquisition of HTML 5 house Nitobi Software. ZDNet says Adobe has quietly told developers that that development of its mobile Flash browser plug-in will stop. Current Android and RIM’s Playbook configurations will get critical bug fixes and security updates. Otherwise, Adobe “will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations.” The company will focus instead on tools for creating mobile apps by packaging the code to run on Adobe AIR. Sounds like a win for the late lamented Steve Jobs. By Wednesday Adobe had blogged about its decision at http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html. It sayd Flash development for PC will continue. The move will reportedly take six months to play out. People are supposedly being told to finish and ship CS6, find another job in the company if they can, or get lost. Sounds like after CS6 ships, especially if the next two quarters aren’t exactly swell, Adobe might can more people. At the moment Adobe expects to take a restructuring charge of $87 million-$94 million, primarily for severance. And because of the charge it cut Q4 guidance from 41 cents-50 cents a share down to 30 cents-38 cents a share. As a result, its stock capitalized after-hours dropping 9% to $27.69. Immediate revenue guidance was unchanged at $1.07 billion-$1.12 billion but next year revenue could be 4%-5% lower. Wall Street expected 2012 revenues to be up 9%. With the changes, Adobe expects to drive “faster and more predicable growth in FY2013 and beyond.”

AppFog Gets $8 Million

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 07:15:00 EDT

Year-old PHP PaaS hoster AppFog, née PHP Fog, has gotten an $8 million B round led by Ignition Partners with participation from new investors Simon Crosby, Citrix’ former data center and virtualization CTO, and VC Matt Ocko as well as existing investors, Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital and Founders Co-Op. That makes $9.8 million altogether. Ignition gets a board seat and Ignition managing director Frank Artale will fill it.

HTML5 - What I Am Learning

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 18:38:00 EDT

With all the discussion around HTML5, I thought I would spend some time getting to know more about it myself. I will be researching it and sharing what I am learning through a series of articles over the next month. I have read that it is expected to have a huge impact on mobile software applications and the business models of software vendors. Is it ready for prime time? I hear a variety of opinions on that subject. Sybase has stated that their goal is to "enable web developers to become mobile application developers" through the use of HTML5 and their mobile SDK that will come with SUP (the Sybase Unwired Platform). I was told by Nick Brown at SAP that version 2.1 of SUP would be out in the September 2011 time frame and this version will include HTML5 support and an HTML5 container.

Five Years Later: OpenAJAX Who?

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 11:45:00 EDT

Five years ago the OpenAjax Alliance was founded with the intention of providing interoperability between what was quickly becoming a morass of AJAX-based libraries and APIs. Where is it today, and why has it failed to achieve more prominence?

I stumbled recently over a nearly five year old article I wrote in 2006 for Network Computing on the OpenAjax initiative. Remember, AJAX and Web 2.0 were just coming of age then, and mentions of Web 2.0 or AJAX were much like that of “cloud” today. You couldn’t turn around without hearing someone promoting their solution by associating with Web 2.0 or AJAX. After reading the opening paragraph I remembered clearly writing the article and being skeptical, even then, of what impact such an alliance would have on the industry. Being a developer by trade I’m well aware of how impactful “standards” and “specifications” really are in the real world, but the problem – interoperability across a growing field of JavaScript libraries – seemed at the time real and imminent, so there was a need for someone to address it before it completely got out of hand.

With the OpenAjax Alliance comes the possibility for a unified language, as well as a set of APIs, on which developers could easily implement dynamic Web applications. A unified toolkit would offer consistency in a market that has myriad Ajax-based technologies in play, providing the enterprise with a broader pool of developers able to offer long term support for applications and a stable base on which to build applications. As is the case with many fledgling technologies, one toolkit will become the standard—whether through a standards body or by de facto adoption—and Dojo is one of the favored entrants in the race to become that standard.

-- AJAX-based Dojo Toolkit , Network Computing, Oct 2006

The goal was simple: interoperability. The way in which the alliance went about achieving that goal, however, may have something to do with its lackluster performance lo these past five years and its descent into obscurity.

5 YEAR ACCOMPLISHMENTS of the OPENAJAX ALLIANCE

The OpenAjax Alliance members have not been idle. They have published several very complete and well-defined specifications including one “industry standard”: OpenAjax Metadata.

OpenAjax Hub

The OpenAjax Hub is a set of standard JavaScript functionality defined by the OpenAjax Alliance that addresses key interoperability and security issues that arise when multiple Ajax libraries and/or components are used within the same web page. (OpenAjax Hub 2.0 Specification)

OpenAjax Metadata

OpenAjax Metadata represents a set of industry-standard metadata defined by the OpenAjax Alliance that enhances interoperability across Ajax toolkits and Ajax products (OpenAjax Metadata 1.0 Specification)
OpenAjax Metadata defines Ajax industry standards for an XML format that describes the JavaScript APIs and widgets found within Ajax toolkits. (OpenAjax Alliance Recent News)

It is interesting to see the calling out of XML as the format of choice on the OpenAjax Metadata (OAM) specification given the recent rise to ascendancy of JSON as the preferred format for developers for APIs. Granted, when the alliance was formed XML was all the rage and it was believed it would be the dominant format for quite some time given the popularity of similar technological models such as SOA, but still – the reliance on XML while the plurality of developers race to JSON may provide some insight on why OpenAjax has received very little notice since its inception.

Ignoring the XML factor (which undoubtedly is a fairly impactful one) there is still the matter of how the alliance chose to address run-time interoperability with OpenAjax Hub (OAH) – a hub. A publish-subscribe hub, to be more precise, in which OAH mediates for various toolkits on the same page. Don summed it up nicely during a discussion on the topic: it’s page-level integration. This is a very different approach to the problem than it first appeared the alliance would take.

The article on the alliance and its intended purpose five years ago clearly indicate where I thought this was going – and where it should go: an industry standard model and/or set of APIs to which other toolkit developers would design and write such that the interface (the method calls) would be unified across all toolkits while the implementation would remain whatever the toolkit designers desired.

I was clearly under the influence of SOA and its decouple everything premise. Come to think of it, I still am, because interoperability assumes such a model – always has, likely always will. Even in the network, at the IP layer, we have standardized interfaces with vendor implementation being decoupled and completely different at the code base. An Ethernet header is always in a specified format, and it is that standardized interface that makes the Net go over, under, around and through the various routers and switches and components that make up the Internets with alacrity. Routing problems today are caused by human error in configuration or failure – never incompatibility in form or function.

Neither specification has really taken that direction. OAM – as previously noted – standardizes on XML and is primarily used to describe APIs and components - it isn’t an API or model itself. The Alliance wiki describes the specification: “The primary target consumers of OpenAjax Metadata 1.0 are software products, particularly Web page developer tools targeting Ajax developers.” Very few software products have implemented support for OAM. IBM, a key player in the Alliance, leverages the OpenAjax Hub for secure mashup development and also implements OAM in several of its products, including Rational Application Developer (RAD) and IBM Mashup Center. Eclipse also includes support for OAM, as does Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. The IDE working group has developed an open source set of tools based on OAM, but what appears to be missing is adoption of OAM by producers of favored toolkits such as jQuery, Prototype and MooTools. Doing so would certainly make development of AJAX-based applications within development environments much simpler and more consistent, but it does not appear to gaining widespread support or mindshare despite IBM’s efforts.

The focus of the OpenAjax interoperability efforts appears to be on a hub / integration method of interoperability, one that is certainly not in line with reality. While certainly developers may at times combine JavaScript libraries to build the rich, interactive interfaces demanded by consumers of a Web 2.0 application, this is the exception and not the rule and the pub/sub basis of OpenAjax which implements a secondary event-driven framework seems overkill. Conflicts between libraries, performance issues with load-times dragged down by the inclusion of multiple files and simplicity tend to drive developers to a single library when possible (which is most of the time). It appears, simply, that the OpenAJAX Alliance – driven perhaps by active members for whom solutions providing integration and hub-based interoperability is typical (IBM, BEA (now Oracle), Microsoft and other enterprise heavyweights – has chosen a target in another field; one on which developers today are just not playing.

It appears OpenAjax tried to bring an enterprise application integration (EAI) solution to a problem that didn’t – and likely won’t ever – exist. So it’s no surprise to discover that references to and activity from OpenAjax are nearly zero since 2009. Given the statistics showing the rise of JQuery – both as a percentage of site usage and developer usage – to the top of the JavaScript library heap, it appears that at least the prediction that “one toolkit will become the standard—whether through a standards body or by de facto adoption” was accurate.

Of course, since that’s always the way it works in technology, it was kind of a sure bet, wasn’t it?

WHY INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICE PROVIDERS and VENDORS CARE ABOUT DEVELOPER STANDARDS

You might notice in the list of members of the OpenAJAX alliance several infrastructure vendors. Folks who produce application delivery controllers, switches and routers and security-focused solutions. This is not uncommon nor should it seem odd to the casual observer. All data flows, ultimately, through the network and thus, every component that might need to act in some way upon that data needs to be aware of and knowledgeable regarding the methods used by developers to perform such data exchanges. In the age of hyper-scalability and über security, it behooves infrastructure vendors – and increasingly cloud computing providers that offer infrastructure services – to be very aware of the methods and toolkits being used by developers to build applications. Applying security policies to JSON-encoded data, for example, requires very different techniques and skills than would be the case for XML-formatted data. AJAX-based applications, a.k.a. Web 2.0, requires different scalability patterns to achieve maximum performance and utilization of resources than is the case for traditional form-based, HTML applications. The type of content as well as the usage patterns for applications can dramatically impact the application delivery policies necessary to achieve operational and business objectives for that application.

As developers standardize through selection and implementation of toolkits, vendors and providers can then begin to focus solutions specifically for those choices. Templates and policies geared toward optimizing and accelerating JQuery, for example, is possible and probable. Being able to provide pre-developed and tested security profiles specifically for JQuery, for example, reduces the time to deploy such applications in a production environment by eliminating the test and tweak cycle that occurs when applications are tossed over the wall to operations by developers. For example, the jQuery.ajax() documentation states:

By default, Ajax requests are sent using the GET HTTP method. If the POST method is required, the method can be specified by setting a value for the type option. This option affects how the contents of the data option are sent to the server. POST data will always be transmitted to the server using UTF-8 charset, per the W3C XMLHTTPRequest standard.

The data option can contain either a query string of the form key1=value1&key2=value2, or a map of the form {key1: 'value1', key2: 'value2'}. If the latter form is used, the data is converted into a query string using jQuery.param() before it is sent. This processing can be circumvented by setting processData to false. The processing might be undesirable if you wish to send an XML object to the server; in this case, change the contentType option from application/x-www-form-urlencoded to a more appropriate MIME type.

Web application firewalls that may be configured to detect exploitation of such data – attempts at SQL injection, for example – must be able to parse this data in order to make a determination regarding the legitimacy of the input. Similarly, application delivery controllers and load balancing services configured to perform application layer switching based on data values or submission URI will also need to be able to parse and act upon that data. That requires an understanding of how jQuery formats its data and what to expect, such that it can be parsed, interpreted and processed.

By understanding jQuery – and other developer toolkits and standards used to exchange data – infrastructure service providers and vendors can more readily provide security and delivery policies tailored to those formats natively, which greatly reduces the impact of intermediate processing on performance while ensuring the secure, healthy delivery of applications.

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How Bad Outdated JavaScript Libraries Are for Page Load Time

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 10:00:00 EDT

Last week at Velocity we hosted a Birds of a Feather Session (BoF) and offered the attendees to analyze their web sites using dynaTrace Ajax Edition. Besides finding the typical performance problems (no cache settings, too many images, not minimized content, …) we found several sites that had one interesting problem in common: OLD VERSIONS of JavaScript libraries such as YUI, jQuery or SPRY.

Handbook of Human Factors in Web Design, Second Edition

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 06:30:00 EDT

Most of the contributor's names are followed with PhD. That is not a bad thing, it is actually good, because the book does not read like it was written by people who's names are followed by PhD, but the material is PhD quality.

Following Best Practices

Tue, 31 May 2011 14:26:00 EDT

From time to time I access my work emails through Outlook Web Access (OWA) – which works really great on all browsers I run on my laptop (IE, FF, Chrome). Guessing that Microsoft probably optimized OWA for its own browser I thought that I will definitely find JavaScript code that doesn’t execute that well on Firefox as compared to Internet Explorer. From an end users perspective there seems to be no noticeable performance difference – but – using dynaTrace Ajax Edition (also check out the Video Tutorials) I found a very interesting JavaScript method that shows a big performance difference when iterating over DOM elements.

Thirty Tips to Optimize HTML/CSS/Images for Smooth Web Experience

Sat, 28 May 2011 12:41:00 EDT

Do you want your customers and/or employees to have a speedy, no-hassle end-user experience when they use your website or server, respectively? Of course you do – because an unsatisfied end-user means lost business – as in the case of a customer – or a really annoyed employee – as in the case of a [...]

Why You Can’t Compare Cross-Browser Execution Times of Selenium Tests

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:00:50 EDT

I am currently working on a blog where I am going to explain how to do cross-browser testing and performance analysis using dynaTrace. Before I am going to blog that How-To I want to share with you one thing that I have noticed when executing my tests in Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.6. Test execution times are very different – but – this is not because one browser is slower than the other. It is because Selenium has different synchronization mechanisms in IE and FF to e.g: wait for a page to be loaded.

Premium AJAX Edition 3 Extensions

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 10:45:00 EDT

If you are serious about Web Development then I am sure you are working on Web 2.0 Applications leveraging several JavaScript Frameworks, making XHR calls to the Server to retrieve dynamic content and also include 3rd party content such as Ads or Social Network Plugins. You probably also have Selenium, WebDriver or any other functional tests in place that get executed in your Continuous Integration environment. If any of this is true, you likely want to automate your efforts around web performance optimization as it is too complex and inefficient to verify performance manually on all your pages across all your supported browsers. dynaTrace offers premium extensions to the free dynaTrace AJAX Edition that can accelerate your tasks through enterprise-class automation. Let’s look at the main capabilities this upgrade gives you.

dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.0 Released

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 07:15:00 EDT

With its latest release, dynaTrace updates its Product Suite for Deep Dive, Automated Cross-Browser Web Performance Optimization with two products: dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.0 is the free standalone tool that has been downloaded by 30k+ users so far supporting both Firefox (3.6, 4.0) and Internet Explorer (6, 7 & 8) dynaTrace Development Team Edition is the Premium Upgrade and provides extended automation, end-to-end performance and automated regression analysis for modern Web 2.0 Applications

Real-Life AJAX Troubleshooting Guide

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:00:00 EDT

One of our clients occasionally runs into the following problem with their web app: They host their B2B web application in their East Coast Data Center with their clients accessing the app from all around the United States. Occasionally they have clients complaining about bad page load times or that certain features just don’t work on their browsers. When the problem can’t be reproduced in-house and all of the “usual suspects” (problem with internet connection, faulty proxy, user error, …) are ruled out they actually have to fly out an engineer to the client to analyze the problem on-site. That’s a lot of time and money spent to troubleshoot a problem.

Performance and Architecture Validation with Existing Unit Tests

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 13:34:03 EST

Agile Development Practices have widely been adopted in R&D Organizations. A core component is Continuous Integration where code changes are continuously integrated and tested to achieve the goal of having "potential shippable code" at the end of every Sprint/Iteration. In order to verify code changes agile team members write Unit or Functional Tests that get executed against every build and every milestone. The results of these tests tell the team whether the functionality of all features is still given and that the recent code changes have not introduced a regression.

Development-as-a-Service Platform Cloud9 IDE

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 16:11:00 EST

Ajax.org just launched Cloud9 IDE, bringing web and mobile app development into the total cloud with a commercial PaaS. Cloud9 IDE provides the first cloud-based Integrated Development Environment for JavaScript incorporating HTML5, and supporting Python, Ruby and PHP. We sat down with the CEO to get the scoop. We want it to be the premier online development environment for JavaScript and HTML5 developers. Cloud9 aims to be more than an IDE by providing the entire infrastructure a developer needs to start, run and debug a project without hassle.

Oracle Pays $46m to Settle Kickback Claims

Sat, 05 Feb 2011 14:00:00 EST

Oracle is going to pay $46 million to settle a 2010 Justice Department suit charging its Sun acquisition with paying kickbacks to get Accenture to recommend it for software contracts with certain federal agencies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The contracts ran from 1998 to 2006. The settlement covers claims that Sun provided incomplete and inaccurate information to government contracting officers during negotiations over contracts with the US Postal Service and two Sun resellers.

Have a Seat Mr. Website Owner, It’s Time for a Little Introspection

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 07:15:00 EST

When a client signs a contract with me for a web design, the first thing I do is send them a three page questionnaire and request they answer as many questions as they deem appropriate. This questionnaire helps me get inside their heads and it helps me better understand their marketing objectives, the opinion of ...

Five Steps to Set Up ShowSlow as a Web Performance Repository

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 06:00:00 EST

Alois Reitbauer explained in detail how dynaTrace continuously monitors several thousand URLs and uploads the performance data to the public ShowSlow.com instance. More and more of our dynaTrace AJAX Community Members are taking advantage of this integration in their internal testing environments. They either use Selenium, Watir or other functional testing tools to continuously test their web applications. They use the free dynaTrace AJAX edition to capture performance metrics such as Time to First Impression, Time to Fully Loaded, Number of Network Requests or Size of the Site. ShowSlow is then used to receive those performance beacons, stores it in a repository and provides a nice Web UI to analyze the captured data over time. The following illustration shows a graph from the public ShowSlow instance that contains performance results for a tested website of a period of several months:

Understanding Twitter’s JavaScript in Multiple Browsers

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 09:30:00 EST

Every time I meet up with web developers, either through a customer engagement or when I am giving a presentation about web performance optimization, I ask this question: Who is using Firefox and who is using Internet Explorer as the main browser? The answer is easy to guess. I hardly ever get any hands raised for Internet Explorer. And honestly – I don’t blame them as there are so many great tools on Firefox such as Firebug or YSlow that are great to profile and debug your web application. The problem though is that a big majority of their end-users are going to use Internet Explorer (46% market share in Nov 2010) and might not be happy with their end-user-experience. Check out the following blog posts for more details on bad performing web sites in Internet Explorer: Top 10 Client-Side Performance Problems in Web 2.0.

Using HTML5 Application Cache to Create Offline Web Applications

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 13:45:00 EST

HTML5 introduces Application Cache, a new feature that enables you to make web apps and sites available offline. The new specification also provides an easy way to prefetch some or all of your web app’s assets (HTML files, images, CSS, JavaScript, and so on) while the client is still online. During this caching process, files are stored in an application cache, where they sit ready for future offline use. Compare this to regular browser caching, in which pages that you visit are cached in the browser’s cache based on server-side rules and client-side configuration. But—even if web pages are cached normally, this does not provide a reliable way for you to access pages while you’re in offline mode (in an airplane, for example). In addition, an application cache can cache pages that have not been visited at all and are therefore typically unavailable in the regular browser cache. Prefetching files can even speed up your site’s performance, though you are of course using bandwidth to download those files initially.

Web Performance Optimization Use Cases - Part 4

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:21:35 EST

In this edition of our WPO Use Case series I discuss another very important use case. Load Time Optimization is most likely the most vital use case from an end user perspective. At the same time it is also highly important from a business perspective as studies by ShopZilla or Google and Bing show that load times have immediate effects on user behavior. The higher the load, the less end users are interested in interacting with the page. Load time therefore has a direct relationship to user acceptance and also business goals.

HTML5: The Web Gets Serious - Part 1

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 05:00:00 EST

This article is first in a series of four that will help readers grasp the changes that are being introduced to the web and web browsers with HTML5. This article will provide an overview of the current browser support for html5 and the kind of things that it can do as well as its limitations.

dynaTrace AJAX Edition Celebrates First Birthday with a New Version

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:16:00 EST

We are celebrating the first birthday of dynaTrace AJAX Edition with a new version of this deep-dive browser diagnostics tool for Internet Explorer. We just recently reached 20k+ active users and are glad that people like Steve Souders or John Resig endorsed this tool in the last year. Download it here! The early adopters already know the first version of this feature from our dynaTrace AJAX Edition 2.0 Beta 1. Based on the Web Performance Optimization Best Practices from dynaTrace, Yahoo and Google we now grade different aspects of the analyzed web site. We look at the usage of Network Caching, Number of Resources on the page, Server-Side and JavaScript Performance as well as overall page load timings. dynaTrace AJAX Edition celebrates its first birthday with a new version Thanks for all the great feedback on our dynaTrace Forums, on our blog posts or through twitter. Our community has driven this release and the enhancements we made. The Good News is: there is more to come :-)

OTRS Launches 3.0 Release with All-New GUI

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:50:27 EST

OTRS (www.otrs.com), the world's leading provider of open source Help Desk and ITIL-compatible IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, today launched OTRS Help Desk 3.0, featuring a brand new Ajax-powered interface designed to dispatch help tickets 30 percent faster, under the most demanding usage scenarios. "OTRS exceeded my expectations and helped to redeem my faith in open source software," stated Paul Hill, System Administrator of the Sitka, Alaska school district. "As a system administrator, you come across open source solutions that are far from refined and so problematic that the amount of work they save aren't worth the time and effort to get them up and running. OTRS was a pleasant change."

New Azul Software Caffeinates Java

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 08:15:00 EDT

Azul Systems this week began what may turn out to be an orderly retreat from its high-priced high-maintenance hardware – appliances based on ever so chi-chi many-core proprietary chips and 10 rounds of VC funding that tops $200 million. By fielding software that runs on 64-bit garden-variety x86 commodity servers and does essentially the same thing as its six-year-old Vega boxes, which is to tickle the performance of ye ole stodgy, garbage collection-constricted Java applications, the company could wind up in the arms of some sugar daddy with a fat pocketbook. The software is the Zing stuff Azul said it was developing over the summer and now it’s here, an elastic runtime platform for all kinds of configurations of Java apps, especially those high-volume ones like web portals, trading platforms and e-commerce web sites, where response times just might be important.

Web Performance Optimization Use Cases

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:03:40 EDT

In my last article I discussed benchmarking as the first use case for Web Performance Optimization (WPO). This time I will take a closer look at optimization. After we have discovered how our site behaves compared to our competition – or any reference we might want to benchmark against – we want to learn how to improve our user experience. We will therefore have a look at different approaches towards optimization.

Web Performance Optimization Use Cases

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 11:28:58 EDT

Web Performance Optimization (WPO) constitutes of a set of activities targeted at improving the performance of web applications. First coined by Steve Souders WPO is developing into a growing industry. Every month new companies and projects offering web performance services emerge. WPO is much more than performance analysis; however, performance analysis is a central part in WPO activities as you must first have the data to decide what you are targeting and even more important to create a business case for web performance in your organization.

End-to-End Monitoring and Load Testing

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 06:27:00 EDT

We’ve learned from recent studies that performance has a direct impact on end-user behavior and revenue. Load Testing is therefore critical to ensure that your application can withstand peak load during online rush hours. Continuous Monitoring of the live system enables a more proactive approach with problem identification. Keynote is an expert when it comes to Mobile and Internet Performance. We at dynaTrace have been working with them to integrate their Load-Testing and 24/7 Monitoring Services with dynaTrace to not only know when applications are slow but to identify why and where they are slow. In this blog I will walk you through the scenario on how End-to-End Monitoring accelerates the testing phase and how to become more proactive when dealing with production problems. A follow up blog will cover Load Testing and how to speed up and reduce load testing cycles when combining Load Testing with Application Performance Management.

Cloud Expo Gold Sponsor SoftLayer Launches Second Dallas Data Center

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 07:15:00 EDT

SoftLayer Technologies, the innovative on-demand data center services provider, on Monday launched its second Dallas data center, located in the company’s recently completed headquarters. Designated DAL05, the new facility features an advanced dual-path network structure, including redundant network interface cards (NICs) in every server. Customers can select up to 2G of connectivity for any DAL05 server, select servers with up to 10G, and configure their networking resources to achieve all new levels of efficiency. “Networking is the killer variable for today’s online services. Social networking, web application, cloud solutions—they all need higher bandwidth and more throughput control than ever,” said Sam Fleitman, Chief Operations Officer for SoftLayer. “DAL05 pushes SoftLayer’s trademark networking advantage even farther. The dual-path structure not only provides greater bandwidth to individual computing units, it lets customers do things like designate separate paths for different traffic streams, optimizing a server’s networking for its specific application.”

Cloud Computing : Pas de Place Pour les Amateurs

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:37:00 EDT

Chez Revevol, nous utilisons Google Apps depuis 2007 et avons vécu deux perturbations de service en trois ans. J'avais d’ailleurs écrit un texte sur mon blog à la suite de l’incident de février 2009. A cette époque, nous utilisions déjà l’outil Google Gears, qui permettait de travailler en mode “off-line”, ce qui fait que l'impact réel de cet incident avait été très limité.

AJAX Best Practices

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:59:44 EDT

My mobile contract is expiring soon, so I went online and checked the different mobile companies for their offerings. All of these sites have a page where you get an overview of all the different phone models available. One one page I noticed that the list of phones started with an empty grid – and then – slowly – images appeared and after that some overlay information on the phone itself was added (such as a link on the facebook, msn or skype page of the phone manufacturer). From a time perspective it took about 2 seconds till I saw something on the page, after 4 got to see the empty grid and after 15 seconds everything was loaded. That made me curious about the internals of that page.

IE Compatibility View

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:26:11 EDT

A client of ours recently contacted me with the question: We use Keynote, WebPagetest and dynaTrace AJAX – but we get different results with these tools/services. WebPagetest tells us that our page is very slow – but dynaTrace on my local machine does not. What can be the problem here? What’s the difference? I took a look at their page on my own laptop – running WinXP and IE8. I saw a small JavaScript performance hotspot but nothing major. Then it occurred to me that WebPagetest is probably using a different browser which made me notice a feature of IE that I haven’t yet explored enough.

i-Government : Trusted Services Cloud infrastructure

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:38:00 EDT

Governments moving to Cloud will be such a major stimulant for the market not just because their spending can act as an ‘anchor client’ for helping new local start-up businesses, those creating local “Green Data-centres”, but because they literally have to play an essential role in creating the Cloud itself. To explain this consider the concept of “i-Government”, rather than e-Government, simply to reflect the role Identity technologies will play. Universal adoption of standards like OpenID will enable ‘single sign-on’ across all web applications, including those of government. This will streamline access for users and the Web 2.0 software that uses it and provides web site features will most likely run in the Cloud.

JavaFX Does Have a Future

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 09:30:00 EDT

In looking back at my JavaFX… does it have a future? posting, my views have been changed by some of the comments made (here and here), in particular about JavaFX vs. Flash/Flex and Java Web Start. JavaFX and applets I agree that comparing JavaFX applets vs Flash/Flex is not something we should be doing. Flash [...]

How to Identify IE Add-Ons that Impact Web Site Performance

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:16:00 EDT

I occasionally get invited to do JavaScript/AJAX Performance Workshops. Last week I spent two days with a group of dynaTrace AJAX Users that work in a performance task force group within their R&D Organization. I asked them about the reasons for this Client-Side Performance Initiative. They told me the following story: One of our sales managers started to complain about several pages of the product we sell being too slow to demo therefore impacting his ability to pitch and sell the product. We analyzed the page in-house but couldn’t reproduce the same exact behavior. After some back and forth we identified that it was the Skype Add-On for Internet Explorer caused the performance hit on those pages that had a very large DOM with many table rows and many nested divs. This raised the awareness of client side performance and that there is much to learn about how browser work and how the generated HTML impacts JavaScript, Rendering and IE Add-Ons.

Best Practices on JavaScript and AJAX Performance

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:44:47 EDT

JavaScript can save your day or it can cause you nightmares. JavaScript and XHR (XmlHttpRequest) enable what the industry considers to be Web 2.0 – meaning highly interactive web sites where some application logic is pushed down to the client into the browsers JavaScript engine. As with any application code – regardless of the language and runtime environment – it is easy to not follow Best Practices which ultimately negatively impact the end-user experience with the site.

The Dichotomy of AJAX and RESTful API's

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 23:03:00 EDT

Had an interesting conversation the other day with Adam, our lead interface developer at Enomaly. He's been our key AJAX and API developer on the Enomaly ECP platform for several years. During our random afternoon chat he basically said that AJAX is quite possibly the worst way to consume a RESTful API. He pointed out the purpose of a RESTful approach to API development & implementation is in its similarities to HTTP and more generally uri/urls -- each of which is easily viewable both programmatic as well as visually. The problem is AJAX is kind of the opposite. Most of the things that make the web great, such as urls, hyperlinks and bookmarking are not easily done or seen in a AJAX application. All the benefits to a RESTful architecture are hidden by the AJAX itself making development longer, more difficult to debug and often harder to scale.