Features

Asynchronous Logging Using Spring

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:45:00 EST

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 typically solved by defining various log levels dependent on a program’s maturity. For example, a program in developmental stages would have a higher logging requirements; logging requirements would be relatively lower in the production phase. If an application requires a lot of logging for audit purposes, then special measures are required to protect performance. This article provides a possible solution for this problem by using Spring asynchronous support. Logging is used extensively to help find problems within applications. A developer who finds a problem can investigate it by enabling debug logging. He may then reproduce the problem, or create additional logging if needed. Programmers usually require extensive logging to locate problems.

Book Excerpt: Introducing HTML5

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:00:00 EST

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 syntax than were present in HTML4. It has rules for parsing to allow different browsers to display the same incorrectly formatted document in the same fashion. There are many notable additions to HTML, such as native drawing support and audiovisual elements. In this excerpt, we discuss the features added by HTML5 and the associated JavaScript APIs.

Best Practices for Business Transaction Management

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:15:00 EDT

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 goal is to answer business-relevant questions that business owners have for application owners: "How much revenue is generated by a certain products?", "What are my conversion and bounce rates and what impacts them?" or “Do we meet our SLAs to our premium account users?” Challenge 1: Contextual Information Is More than just the URL In order to answer these questions we need information captured from the underlying technical transactions that get executed by your applications when users interact with your services/web site. Knowing the accessed URL, its average response time and then mapping it to a Business Transaction is the simplest form of Business Transaction Management – but doesn’t work in most cases because modern applications don’t pass the whole business transaction context in the URL.

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.

Just Another Fool with a Tool

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 10:40:00 EST

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 its misty glow. At the heart of the Business Intelligence concept lies the seemingly trivial ability to get answers to important questions. The CEO may ask the CFO how quarterly sales look compared to the previous year, and the online marketer may ask himself to which landing page they should direct new traffic for maximum conversions. To each of them, their question is equally important and has great impact on their course of action.

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.

ADCs Accelerate Web 2.0 Applications . . .

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 11:36:00 EST

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 in challenges to both datacenter and network infrastructure, as these new application deployments require much greater communication between client browsers and servers. Traditional web applications use browsers simply as rendering engines where all the application logic (e.g., user information, page format, etc.) is located on the servers. For the most part, the browser displays the formatted HTML pages that are sent by the server, where most of the processing is accomplished. Web 2.0 applications, however, distribute the logic between the server and browser. The browser becomes more than a rendering engine and is capable of processing application logic on the client side without requiring the exchange of data with the server. The benefits of this capability include more features enabled, greater functionality and a more compelling user interface with interactive capabilities far beyond what traditional web applications can provide.

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.

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.

Seven Rules to Improve Your Application Performance Practices

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:48:02 EDT

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 help you to avoid playing the classical blame game which normally happens when something goes wrong

Behind the Scenes of ASP.NET MVC 2

Thu, 13 May 2010 08:15:00 EDT

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 build web applications on top of ASP.NET. The updated support in Visual Studio also makes it very appealing to choose MVC instead of traditional ASP.NET.

Better Caching Helps Frankfurt’s Airport Website to Handle More Load...

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:16:27 EDT

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 almost impossible. The website of Germans largest airport – Frankfurt am Main – was hardly reachable. No wonder as I assume that their page just got hammered by thousands of additional page requests of frustrated travellers. Now it’s Tuesday and the website is back to “almost acceptable” response times. Time for me to analyze the current web site as I’ve done with others such as vancouver2010, utah.travel.com or masters.com.

HTML5 Web Sockets: A Quantum Leap in Scalability for the Web

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:15:00 EST

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 colossal advance, especially for real-time, event-driven web applications. HTML5 Web Sockets provides such a dramatic improvement from the old, convoluted "hacks" that are used to simulate a full-duplex connection in a browser that it prompted Google’s Ian Hickson – the HTML5 specification lead – to say: “Reducing kilobytes of data to 2 bytes…and reducing latency from 150ms to 50ms is far more than marginal. In fact, these two factors alone are enough to make Web Sockets seriously interesting to Google.” Let’s look at how HTML5 Web Sockets can offer such an incredibly dramatic reduction of unnecessary network traffic and latency by comparing it to conventional solutions.

Reflections on Java Command Line Options

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:15:00 EST

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 variety of option styles. It also uses Java's reflection capability to automatically assign values to variables in a specified class.

Six Enterprise Megatrends to Watch in 2010

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:45:00 EST

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) long before SOA was over-hyped. And most enterprise technologists I know were investigating constructs of scalable, elastic Cloud [...] Related posts:

Ensuring Website Performance

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:45:00 EST

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 order to make sure that web pages are fast from the start it is very important to constantly and continuously measure web page performance throughout the development phase and in testing. There are two questions that need to be answered * What is the time the user actually perceives as web response time? * How to measure it accurately and in an automated way?

The Next-Generation of Business Intelligence

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:00:00 EST

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 affect any organization.

101 on Prototype CSS Selectors

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST

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 by using the native browser functions like getElementById or getElementsByTagName. Lookups by class name are not natively supported in IE and are therefore implemented in JavaScript by iterating through all elements in the DOM – which is obviously much slower than a native implementation.

Performance Analysis of Dynamic JavaScript Menus

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

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 – in that particular case it was the superfish jQuery plugin. A closer analysis showed why it takes so long and this also got me to do some research on these menus.

Practical Approaches for Optimizing Website Performance

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:00:00 EDT

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 caused by an array of problems, from browser mechanics to server configuration, and a clear understanding of how to address these problems will provide AJAX ASP.NET developers with the tools necessary to make any website faster.

The Reality of Software Testing in an Agile Environment

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:15:00 EDT

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, testing the software throughout its development."*

An Introduction to Abbot

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:45:00 EDT

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 replayed to re-create user interactions for a particular scenario. In the test programs, the test designer tries to understand and write tests for the various GUI decision points. This article discusses how Abbot can be used to quickly and effectively come up with a comprehensive GUI test framework for Swing GUI applications. Abbot (http://abbot.sourceforge.net/) is a JUnit extension for Swing GUI testing. It provides an interesting framework that can be used for test case generation as well as "record and execute" scripting.

Navigating the RIA Iceberg

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:15:00 EDT

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 enterprises and ISVs looking for an efficient way of acquiring RIA-build capabilities, there is now a new breed of end-to-end RIA platforms designed to overcome the limited scope of client-side RIA platforms and the lack of deployment flexibility inherent in cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service solutions.

RIAs for Web 3.0 Using the Microsoft Platform

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:45:00 EDT

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, which is called Web 3.0. It might be a little early to completely define what Web 3.0 will be but there are many indications of what will shape it.

REA Is Where RIA Becomes the Norm

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:00:00 EDT

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 “masters of all and specialists in none.”

Java Persistence on the Grid: Approaches to Integration

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:00:00 EDT

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 writing back changes made to these entities. JPA offers developers productivity gains over writing and maintaining their own mapping code allowing a single API regardless of the platform, application server, or persistence provider implementation.

Case Study: Manufacturing Activity Management System

Wed, 13 May 2009 10:29:16 EDT

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, cannot readily provide the necessary site access control or comprehensive reporting, neither for planned activities nor for review of activities, in the event of an issue.

VDI and UEM Help Level the Playing Field for Rich UI Developers

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:00:00 EDT

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 for trouble. The good news is that VDI combined with User Environment Management along the lines of what is offered by Appsense enables deployment of a standardized UI "easel".

First Time with AJAX.NET

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 23:00:00 EDT

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 startup, the machine would load the thinnest of all possible operating systems, and everything else – applications, data, you name it – would be stored on the network and accessed via a hyper-dynamic web browser.

Developing Rich Client Applications Using Swing - II

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 23:00:00 EST

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 and evaluate them with an eye to Swing development for rich client applications.

Appcelerator Revolutionizes UI Prototyping

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 07:15:00 EST

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 prototype? Finally, what if the prototype wasn't a prototype at all, but was the actual user-interface of the final product (zero throwaway code)... even if you haven't decided which server-side technology you want to use (Java, .Net, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl)?

Rich Internet Applications or Rich Interactive Experiences?

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:45:00 EDT

'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 applications, data visualizations and what he calls 'other fun pieces of Internet-enabled software' for a living, is not a fan of 'RIA' as a term.

Bringing Excellence to the Field of UI Engineering

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:00:00 EDT

"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 Conference & Expo in San Jose, California (October 20-22, 2008).

Engelbart's Usability Dilemma: Efficiency vs Ease-of-Use

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:15:00 EDT

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 like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Where Are RIA Technologies Headed in 2008?

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 02:45:00 EST

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 the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that, readers can themselves infer: where is AJAX headed next?

i-Technology 2008 Predictions: Where's RIAs, AJAX, SOA and Virtualization Headed in 2008?

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:00:00 EST

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 the mere mega-mergers of 2007? As usual at the end of each year, SYS-CON has been informally polling its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors. As always, the range and depth of their answers is fascinating, throwing light not just on where the industry is going but also how it's going to get there, why, because of who, within what kind of time-scale. Enjoy!

Prescribing AJAX: Panacea, Placebo, or Poison? Peeling the AJAX Onion

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:30:00 EST

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 nail to be pounded with the AJAX hammer? Some of the fundamental technologies that AJAX is based on, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, can sometimes offer simpler, more elegant solutions that are better suited to certain user experiences.

A Simple Streaming AJAX App with OpenAjax Hub, TIBCO GI, and DWR 2.0

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 10:30:00 EDT

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 architectural strategy is to use AJAX pieces and parts that can work together. At the core of the system in Figure 2 is the OpenAjax Hub (see the OpenAjax Hub for Interop sidebar). We'll use the OAA Hub as a central publish/subscribe bus to which we can publish the live stock data so that the data grid and the future visual controls and functions can listen for those events and messages.