Chris Degiere and Associates

Globalization has made it impossible to ignore how your web application performs for an international audience. Tools like YSlow and PageSpeed will tell you why your pages are slow, but you don’t truly know the pain of your end user abroad until you’ve used the application first hand over a high latency low bandwidth network.

One easy way to try this sans the layovers and jet lag is to place a proxy server between your browser and web server that simulates stressed network conditions. DonsProxy is a great tool that does this and much more.

Download the GUI from the SourceForge page or checkout an example running from an ant build via my Reference Project Page at Google Code.

Here’s an excerpt from the ant build to start the proxy:

<target name="start-proxy" depends="build"
	description="Starts the proxy server that simulates a slow connection, then stop after 2 minutes">
<java fork="false" classname="com.moneybender.proxy.Proxy" failonerror="true"
	classpathref="master-classpath" maxmemory="1024m">
	<jvmarg line="-Dlisten.port=9090" />
	<jvmarg line="-Dtarget.host=localhost" />
	<jvmarg line="-Dtarget.port=8080" />
	<jvmarg line="-Dlatency.millis=300" />
	<jvmarg line="-Dpacket.loss.rate=100" />
	<jvmarg line="-Dbandwidth.throttle=40" />
</java>
 </target>

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Well it’s been a busy few months with the new baby and new work taking most all of my time. How to quickly recap? How about a peek at my Delicious links or my Twitter stream.

Noteworthy Links

• Ext JS – Blog
• Ext + Java + Spring + DWR – Ext JS Forums
• Firebug Console Object and API

Even More
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Competitive research and traffic analysis is an important part of launching a new site or web app.

I did a quick study that uses source code search sites as the subject for comparison. Here I  highlight some key metrics from these two Firefox add-ons:

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There are a number of online emulators available to test your mobile web applications once they are deployed. Opera Mini has an online demo at http://www.operamini.com/demo/ for example.

When developing locally it’s helpful to do some functional and visual design and layout testing before deploying.

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Here’s two trend analysis examples from two different sources that I use regularly.

The first is based on job posting keywords which is useful to gauge how marketable your skill set is or how likely you are to find staff given the skills you require. Here’s a simple example. Go Java!

via: indeed.com

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