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...

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 ...

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...

'The Java backlash,' writes Bruce Eckel, 'has been building up steam, and we're starting to see some fundamental shifts because of it.' Java has been around for 10 years yet applets are not the primary way that we interact with the web. Applets are not ubiquitous, and everyone got exci...

The significance of blogging is not the word 'blog' whether used as a verb or a noun, but its role as a harbinger of the game-changing Web-as-platform revolution. In particular, the migration of blogging from the individual toward the enterprise...

It has come a long, long way since February 2005 when Jesse James Garrett coined the now universally used term for it: the rise and rise of 'AJAX' has been meticulously reflected in the pages of SYS-CON Media's magazines and web sites. We take an end-of-year look at its first 22 months...

Six month ago, Alex Iskold switched from J2EE Grid Computing to Web 2.0, JavaScript and Firefox extension development. He has been writing in Web 2.0 Journal about his experiences - see 'From J2EE to JavaScript.' This is the next instalment...

Now that the web is well on its way to becoming more responsive, smoother and reliable - and correspondingly more enjoyable to work with - AJAXWorld Magazine stops up and tries to 'freeze-frame' the moment. We take a look at the question that is presently on the mind of hundreds and th...

In a projection that comes on the heels of an AJAXWorld discussion of burgeoning security issues currently plaguing the AJAX model, a recent SitePoint and Ektron survey of Web professionals has suggested AJAX will soon surpass Flash as the predominant Web development model of choice.

With just four days to go before the start of AJAXWorld 2006, which begins with a pre-conference AJAX University Bootcamp on October 2 followed by two full days of Conference & Expo on October 3-4, it is looking increasingly likely that every single ticket will be sold. As of this writ...

Japan knows web 2.0 - probably better than us in US. But very few people in Japan have heard of or paid attention to MySpace. Their attention is on Mixi, the biggest social networking site in Japan.

According to its founding light David Heinemeier Hansson, Ruby on Rails (RoR) is about 'taking the pain away and making you happy.' Hansson says he knowingly advises people, before they try Rails, to cut their teeth in web-development on the mainstream offerings first. 'Once you've tri...

Steve Ballmer, who after all is a 'mere' executive, not a founder like the rest of them, comes in at number fifteen in the newly-released Forbes 400 Richest Americans list. The list confirms the hugely dominant role played by technology in creating billionaires in the USA: no fewer tha...

As the result of his visit last week to Japan to speak at the 2006 ProWise Power Forum in Tokyo, Coach Wei - Chairman and CTO of Nexaweb - discovered that in Japan they have been adopting 'Web 2.0' technologies for some incredibly complex and mission critical systems with great success...

Just fifteen years after Tim (now Sir Tim) Berners-Lee made public a little project he called the World Wide Web, something new is happening. And it involves, if not AJAX, then some kind of similar approach: this four-letter word, and the approach it crystallizes, has catalyzed a profo...

Tightly defined, AJAX simply describes a technology that transports information to and from the browser and not how that information is displayed. To purists, AJAX is about communicating asynchronously from the browser using JavaScript and XML, nothing more. To others, through their ex...

In most cases I'm a patient and tolerant person. Once you get to know me, I'm easy to get along with, occasionally complex, but not very often. My patience and tolerance has pretty much gone out the window in the last week or so. It all stems from two technologies: Ruby On Rails (RoR) ...

Ajax(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) means many things to many people. However, one thing is certain: To users it implies a higher level of functionality and an improved experience. To the developer, another certainty follows: More work. The only question is how much work and to what ...

After spending the last 12-18 months involved in a lot of 'Web 2.0' conversations and reading a lot of 'Web 2.0' materials, I am confused. Starting from some people's question about whether Web 2.0 exists, whether/how Web 2.0 stories such as MySpace/Google/YouTube/Flickr are meaningful...

I have been discussing the potential implications of what is being termed - by Microsoft Technical Fellow, Dr. Gary Flake - the Internet Singularity. The core of this concept is that the Internet and physical worlds will become more and more tightly coupled. This is already happening a...

Pageview counts are as susceptible as hit counts to site design decisions that have nothing to do with actual usage. That, argues Evan Williams, is part of the reason MySpace drives such an amazing number of pageviews: it's because their site design is so terrible. So what's a better m...

Pattern: Concurrent Document Loader Problem: Need to load multiple documents and can't proceed until all of them are loaded Example: Load configuration files for an AJAX application