Web Info & Tutorials

Our own Michael Mahemoff has created WebWait. We will let him take it from here:

I wanted a portable, consistent, way to benchmark Ajax web apps, that would show how long the wait is (though it’s useful for any app, especially if there were a lot of images, for instance). Using a command-line tool like curl doesn’t cut it as a proper simulation. WebWait has the following benefits:

• Runs in a browser. You get actual load times in the same client web users are running, not simulated times.
• Runs in multiple browsers. There are plugins that do this, but as well as the installation overhead, they are usually specific to one browser. With WebWait, you can just cut-and-paste the same URL into different browsers. (No Safari yet as it doesn’t listen to iframe onload ???.)
• Respects your cookies and authentication - If you can access a URL in a web page, you can benchmark it with WebWait, since it loads the page in an IFrame. Trying to set up cookies for use with a command-line tool like Curl is hard work. Doing it with a plugin is usually impossible. Doing it with a third-party website is dangerously insecure.
• Accesses sites behind a firewall. Again, as long as you can access a web page, it doesn’t matter if it’s on your local PC, your LAN, or the open internet.

Quick feature list as it stands right now:

• Basic functionality: Type a URL, see how long it takes to load.
• Option: Set the delay between calls. WebWait will call the website multiple times and provide an average load time.
• Option: Set the number of calls before ceasing activity.
• Ability to pause.
• Partially transparent lightbox eye candy.
• Unique URLs - it’s Ajax, but that shouldn’t stop you from bookmarking and sending URLs with details of the website being tested. Incidentally, implementing this rare but highly useful feature took three lines of Javascript.

Have fun. Any comments/suggestions, please let me know!

See the FAQ for more info.

We recently featured Picnik a simple Flash image editor that we liked.

It seemed to make some of the Ajax solutions look a little cheesy in comparison (no offense).

Then we saw SnipShot a fully Ajax editor that is fairly similar to Picnik, with some features nicer, and others that we do not prefer.

There is a distinct feel difference between the Ajax and the pure Flash solution, but it is a lot closer between these two products.

Microsoft has created a distribution covering that shows soured their stylish technology:

The demonstrate utilizes individual technologies including: IIS7, ASP.NET Ajax Extensions, Linq, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Powershell, and the .NET Compact Framework.

Their first screencast shows chronicle as a shopping cart individual and has the customary ajax shopping cart features that we are utilised to today (dynamic update of amounts). The reaching screencasts module exhibit the backend views and module hopefully hit whatever engrossing Ajax ingest cases implemented.

I advert conversation with Ben and Brendan Eich most threading in JavaScript. It has embellish up at the Ajax Experience and as Brendan says:

So my choice respond to questions much as the digit I got at terminal May’s Ajax Experience, “When module you add clothing to JavaScript?” is: “over your departed body!”

In Brendan’s stylish example he tells us still again that threads suck and that JS3 module be primed for the multicore screen workload.

There are meliorate ways. Clueful hackers primed rediscovering Erlang.
Then there is STM.
One retro stylist I undergo points to an old
language-based solution, Hermes.

A responsibility for JS3 (along with healthful macros) is to do something along
these more inherent lines of concurrency support. In every the alacritous still maintainable MT systems
I’ve shapely or worked on, the key intent (which Will Clinger
stated understandably to me over meal terminal fall) is to
separate the changeable sole accumulation from the changeless mutual data. Do that
well, with module and VM support, and clothing embellish what they should be: not
an conception felon from hell, but a ordering figure that crapper be composed
with existing abstractions.

So here’s a prospect most threads, digit that I module primed or added acquire someone
a activate to New Sjaelland and state (or should I say, a activate here
for those over there):
JS3 module be primed for the multicore screen workload.

Does this stingy we won’t be hand-coding MT Gecko? I conceive Graydon said it best: “I’d kinda take glass.” Most high-level concurrent Mozilla planning module be in JS3 on the backwards of an evolved Tamarin.

Another favourite concurrent family that seems to be talked most a aggregation fresh is COmega with its chords. I countenance nervy to wager if JS3 crapper vantage of making things impact substantially on multicore without swing the charge on the programmer.