Push-based versus pull-based data transfer in AJAX applications.

Veebipõhistes rakenduses on populaarsust kogunud AJAX ja COMET tehnoloogiad, mis võimaldavad luua interaktiivseid veebirakendusi. COMET funktsionaalsuse saavutamiseks on mitu meetodit, nimelt pikk päring ning lükkamine. Käesoleva bakalaureusetöö eesmärgiks on võrrelda neid erinevaid tehnoloogiaid raamistikus, mille lõid Ali Mesbah et al., kes võrdlesid AJAX-it ning pikka pärimismeetodit oma artikklis „Performance Testing of Data Delivery Techniques for AJAX Applications“. Bakalaureusetöös loodi uus lükkamispõhine test ning võrreldi selle jõudlust teiste raamistikus olevate testidega. Tulemused näitasid, et lükkamispõhine rakendus kasutas väga vähe TCP pakette ning omas väikest latentsust, keskmiselt 1305ms. Samas oli CPU kasutus kõrge ning mõned teated ei jõudnud kasutajani. Tänu nendele tulemustele, arvestades ka teisi lükkamispõhise meetodi puudujääke, leidis autor, et lükkamispõhise meetodi kasutamine pika päringu asemel ei ole kirjutamise hetkel õigustatud.The Internet contains an ever increasing number of interactive applications, powered by technologies like AJAX and COMET. The latter has multiple ways of achieving the desired functionality, namely long-polling and streaming. While there have been many comparisons between AJAX and the traditional model of the web and even AJAX and long-polling, little research has been done comparing streaming to long-polling. This thesis aims to compare the different technologies in a framework created by Ali Mesbah et al., who compared polling and long-polling solutions in their 2008 article „Performance Testing of Data Delivery Techniques for AJAX Applications“. A new streaming test was created and compared with the other tests included in the framework. The results showed that streaming used very little network resources, using only one packet per message after the initial connections were made. Latency was also not an issue as messages were received by the client in 1305ms on average. However CPU usage and data coherence were not as good. Streaming dropped 1-2 messages where long-polling dropped none and the CPU usage was high at unpredictable times. These results, along with other shortcomings of the streaming method, led the author to determine that streaming is not a viable alternative to long-polling or polling at this time

Testing Mobile Web Applications for W3C Best Practice Compliance

Adherence to best practices and standards when developing mobile web applications is important to achieving a quality outcome. As smartphones and tablet PCs continue to proliferate in the consumer electronics market, businesses and individuals are increasingly turning from the native application paradigm to HTML 5-based web applications as a means of software development and distribution. With an everincreasing reliance by users on the correct functioning of such applications, the requirement for stringent and comprehensive quality assurance measures is also brought sharply into focus. This research investigates the increasing trend towards mobile web application development in the mobile software domain, and assesses the requirement for an automated approach to best practice validation testing for mobile web applications. Contemporary approaches to automated web application testing are examined, with particular emphasis on issues relating to mobile web application tests. The individual guidelines proposed by the W3C Mobile Web Application Best Practices are analysed and where applicable automated conformance tests are implemented in a customised testing tool. A range of mobile web applications are tested using this tool in order to examine the extent to which implementation of the tested-for guidelines is detected. Automated tests were successfully implemented in respect of nearly 60% of the best practices

Exploration of Dynamic Web Page Partitioning for Increased Web Page Delivery Performance

The increasing use of the Internet and demand for real-time information has increased the amount of dynamic content generated residing in more complex distributed environments. The performance of delivering these web pages has been improved through more traditional techniques such as caching and newer techniques such as pre-fetching. In this research, we explore the dynamic partitioning of web page content using concurrent AJAX requests to improve web page delivery performance for resource intensive synchronous web content. The focus is more on enterprise web applications that exist in an environment such that a page\u27s data and processing is not local to one web server, rather requests are made from the page to other systems such as database, web services, and legacy systems. From these types of environments, the dynamic partitioning method can make the most performance gains by allowing the web server to run requests for partitions of a page in parallel while other systems return requested data. This differentiates from traditional uses of AJAX where traditionally AJAX is used for a richer user experience making a web application appear to be a desktop application on the user\u27s machine. Often these AJAX requests are also initiated by a user action such as a mouse click, key press, or used to check the server periodically for updates. In this research we studied the performance of a manually partitioned page and built a dynamic parser to perform dynamic partitioning and analyzed the performance results of two types of applications, one where most processing is local and another where processing is dependent on other systems such as database, web services and legacy systems. The results presented show that there are definite performance gains in using a partitioning scheme in a web page to deliver the web page faster to the use

Exploration of Dynamic Web Page Partitioning for Increased Web Page Delivery Performance

The increasing use of the Internet and demand for real-time information has increased the amount of dynamic content generated residing in more complex distributed environments. The performance of delivering these web pages has been improved through more traditional techniques such as caching and newer techniques such as pre-fetching. In this research, we explore the dynamic partitioning of web page content using concurrent AJAX requests to improve web page delivery performance for resource intensive synchronous web content. The focus is more on enterprise web applications that exist in an environment such that a page\u27s data and processing is not local to one web server, rather requests are made from the page to other systems such as database, web services, and legacy systems. From these types of environments, the dynamic partitioning method can make the most performance gains by allowing the web server to run requests for partitions of a page in parallel while other systems return requested data. This differentiates from traditional uses of AJAX where traditionally AJAX is used for a richer user experience making a web application appear to be a desktop application on the user\u27s machine. Often these AJAX requests are also initiated by a user action such as a mouse click, key press, or used to check the server periodically for updates. In this research we studied the performance of a manually partitioned page and built a dynamic parser to perform dynamic partitioning and analyzed the performance results of two types of applications, one where most processing is local and another where processing is dependent on other systems such as database, web services and legacy systems. The results presented show that there are definite performance gains in using a partitioning scheme in a web page to deliver the web page faster to the use

HTTP Mailbox - Asynchronous RESTful Communication

We describe HTTP Mailbox, a mechanism to enable RESTful HTTP communication in an asynchronous mode with a full range of HTTP methods otherwise unavailable to standard clients and servers. HTTP Mailbox allows for broadcast and multicast semantics via HTTP. We evaluate a reference implementation using ApacheBench (a server stress testing tool) demonstrating high throughput (on 1,000 concurrent requests) and a systemic error rate of 0.01%. Finally, we demonstrate our HTTP Mailbox implementation in a human assisted web preservation application called "Preserve Me".Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, 8 code blocks, 3 equations, and 3 table

AMP: A Science-driven Web-based Application for the TeraGrid

The Asteroseismic Modeling Portal (AMP) provides a web-based interface for astronomers to run and view simulations that derive the properties of Sun-like stars from observations of their pulsation frequencies. In this paper, we describe the architecture and implementation of AMP, highlighting the lightweight design principles and tools used to produce a functional fully-custom web-based science application in less than a year. Targeted as a TeraGrid science gateway, AMP's architecture and implementation are intended to simplify its orchestration of TeraGrid computational resources. AMP's web-based interface was developed as a traditional standalone database-backed web application using the Python-based Django web development framework, allowing us to leverage the Django framework's capabilities while cleanly separating the user interface development from the grid interface development. We have found this combination of tools flexible and effective for rapid gateway development and deployment.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, in Proceedings of the 5th Grid Computing Environments Worksho