Each application developer faces the problem of logging usage information. On the one hand, the more logging that’s done the easier it is to detect and locate the source of problems. On the other hand, large volume logging might impair an application’s performance. This problem is typ...

HTML5 is a draft specification for the next major iteration of HTML. It represents a break from its predecessors, HTML4 and XHTML. Some elements have been removed and it is no longer based on SGML, an older standard for document markup. HTML5 also has more allowances for incorrect synt...

The term Business Transactions and Business Transaction Management is widely used in the industry but it’s not always well understood what we really mean by it. The BTM Industry Portal provides some good articles on this topic and is definitely recommended to check out. The general goa...

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...

Once, when Business Intelligence (BI) wasn't a multi-billion dollar industry, it was an idyllic concept which revolved around enabling an analytic approach to business decision making. That's what made me fall in love with BI over 10 years ago and what, in my view, gives the BI space i...

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 ...

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 o...

Web 2.0 applications bring powerful user interfaces with new capabilities and higher functionality to the Web, while new browser-side application intelligence delivers a richer user experience. However, along with the new capabilities, Web 2.0 applications create new issues that result...

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 proacti...

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 emp...

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?...

In this article I discuss the seven most important steps to improve your application performance practices. These simple-to-follow practices will help you to improve the way you deal with application performance. Besides eventually improving the performance of your applications it will...

With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft is shipping the next version of the popular ASP.NET MVC Framework with its IDE. A year ago I blogged about my findings when getting my hands on the first version of ASP.NET MVC. The MVC Framework provides really nice features that make it very easy to...

Along with so many others I am stranded in Europe waiting for my flight back to the United States right now. The Volcano not only impacts flights across Europe but also impacts web sites of airports, airlines and travel agencies around the world. Checking my flight status on Sunday was...

Lately there has been a lot of buzz around HTML5 Web Sockets, which defines a full-duplex communication channel that operates through a single socket over the Web. HTML5 Web Sockets is not just another incremental enhancement to conventional HTTP communications; it represents a colossa...

 

Abstract

There are many different types of command line options that programs need to recognize. Many languages (e.g.: bash and perl) has built-in processing of command line options; Java does not. The Java Command Line Options (JCLO) package performs this task for a va...

Most enterprise technologists should see a continued payoff of the hard work in planning, architecture, documentation, development and configuration work that has been occurring over the last several years.  Enterprise technologists were building Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) lo...

In order to ensure that end user response times are acceptable at all times it is necessary to measure the time in the way the end user perceives performance. Measuring and monitoring your live system is important to identify problems early on before it affects too many end users. In o...

Most people think of traditional business intelligence (BI) as a collection of business-critical information from inside the enterprise. However, consumer comments, independent reviews, and market reports online are crucial pieces of information coming from the outside that infinitely ...

Performance implications of certain CSS Selectors are not specific to a certain JavaScript Library like Prototype. I recently blogged about the internals of CSS Selectors in jQuery. The same holds true for every JavaScript library that offers CSS Selectors. Certain lookups can be done ...

In my previous article I talked about the impact of jQuery Selectors on a page that I analyzed. The page took 4.8 seconds in the onLoad event handler. 2 seconds were mainly caused by the selectors as described in the blog. The other 2.8 seconds were caused by a dynamic JavaScript menu ...

Optimizing website performance is a challenging task. Websites are composed of many moving parts – both on the client and on the server – and optimizing performance requires a multi-faceted approach that addresses potential problems in all moving parts. Performance bottlenecks are caus...

The definition of agile testing can be described as follows: "Testing practice for projects using agile technologies, treating development as the customer of testing and emphasizing a test-first design philosophy. In agile development, testing is integrated throughout the lifecycle, te...

The common methods for functional GUI testing are the "record and execute" script technique and writing test programs for different scenarios. In the "record and execute," the test designer interacts with the GUI and all the events are recorded in a script. The script can later be repl...

Rich Internet Applications for the Enterprise (Enterprise RIA) can convey multiple benefits to a business, from lower cost of ownership, overall application availability and better security, to tremendous user experience. But these benefits come at a price: complexity and cost. For ent...

The level of functionality on the Web is changing and the bar is rising on what is considered a true rich Internet application (RIA). This fact and the emergence of the Web as an interconnected platform is once again changing the landscape and moving us into the next phase of the Web, ...

Do you believe that the day when programmers could focus on one language in their jobs is gone? Thanks to the ever-changing IT landscape and the uncertain financial times, contemporary developers are expected to work with a wide range of platforms, frameworks, languages as essentially ...

The Java Persistence API (JPA) is the enterprise standard for accessing relational data in Java. JPA provides support for mapping Java objects to a database schema and includes a simple programming API and expressive query language for retrieving mapped entities from a database and wri...

Manufacturing industries extensively use contract resources to perform 'non-core' or 'overload' tasks or services, and require business processes and systems to manage and control the activity of these providers. Paper based processes, while apparently simple and effective up-front, ca...

While the browser wars are back in full force, it's good to see UEM solutions like Appsense helping to make VDI a slam-dunk decision, let alone a practical one for rich enterprise app deployments. Enterprises that develop on multiple UI paradigms and standards have always been asking f...

In a former life, I was a web developer. Back in the late '90s, I vividly remember being told by more than one of my computer science professors that in 10 years, everything would run in a web browser. Even the operating system (it was claimed at the time) would be browser based. On st...

In Part 1 of this article, I introduced rich client development, available architectures for developing rich client applications based on the Swing toolkit, and technologies that could be used to make development more productive. In this second part, I’ll compare the most popular IDEs ...

What if you could build the user interface prototype in a matter of days or weeks without a single line of server-side code or even a datamodel? What if the business owner could not only play with this prototype, but also provide context specific feedback seamlessly while exploring the...

'Enough with the new words already.' That was how Sean Voisen recently ended a discussion about the burgeoning technology lexicon, which he thinks can only be explained as 'a ploy to keep Merriam-Webster in business.' Voisen, who designs and builds Rich Internet Applications, web appli...

"My mission has always been to bring excellence to the field of user interface engineering," says Bill Scott, Director of User Interface Engineering at Netflix, in this Exclusive Q&A with SYS-CON's AJAX & RIA Journal in the run-up to his session on October 20 at AJAX World RIA Conferen...

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys li...

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of t...

2007 was the undoubtedly the year of Social Networking, but what of 2008? Will '08 be the year of 'Unified Communications' or the year when CMS comes to stand for 'Community Management System' - or even 'Collaboration Management System'? Or will it be the year of a giga-merger, to beat...

Ever since Jesse James Garrett coined the term AJAX to describe the collection of existing technologies that allow increased responsiveness and interactivity of webpages, its adoption has been embraced across the Web. But have designers and developers gone overboard? Is everything a na...

Follow along and implement the real-time streaming AJAX system in Figure 1 using two different AJAX toolkits and the OpenAjax Hub. We don't have to build the above system from scratch, and can instead leverage readily available, reusable AJAX parts to get the job done quickly; the arch...