Reflecting on Nodejs vs Play

April 6, 2011

My last post on Play vs Nodejs got a lot of traffic in the last 10 days, but it also opened a number of conversations. Here are the key comments.

9 comments Read the full article →

Nodejs vs Play for Front-End Apps

March 26, 2011

Mar 29, 2011: The source used for these tests is now available at https://github.com/s3u/ebay-srp-nodejs and https://github.com/s3u/ebay-srp-play. Mar 27, 2011: I updated the charts based on new runs and some feedback. If you have any tips for improving numbers for either Nodejs or Play, please leave a comment, and I will rerun the tests. We often [...]

129 comments Read the full article →

Performance of RESTful Apps

March 4, 2011

A while ago I showed how chatty some well-known apps are on my iPhone. But this issue is neither new nor unique to apps on phones and similar devices. Efficient data retrieval from distributed/decentralized servers is a well-recognized problem in distributed computing. For instance, in the abstract of his November 1994 paper A Note on [...]

36 comments Read the full article →

Web Apps and Web Sites

February 25, 2011

I just caught up with the recent reactions to the “hashbang” episode. Of all the reactions, I’m most intrigued by Ben Cherry‘s post. Ben’s point is that the Web has been slowly transforming from “traditional web sites” into “desktop-class applications” served via HTTP, and that “the hashbang is in the unfortunate position of being the [...]

17 comments Read the full article →

Can Pipelining Help?

February 6, 2011

HTTP pipelining is often suggested as a way to dramatically improve page load times, or to solve multi-GET use cases for RESTful applications. Whether pipelining can achieve the intended effect or not truly depends on what gets pipelined and how the server implements pipelining. When using pipelining, a HTTP client sends idempotent HTTP requests (such [...]

25 comments Read the full article →

Referer FUD

January 30, 2011

Gabriel Wienberg: For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about: when you click on a link on the Internet, where you clicked from gets automatically sent to the site you clicked on (most of the time). For example, if you’re on yahoo.com and you click to a story at the New [...]

2 comments Read the full article →

Save 60% on RESTful Web Services Cookbook

January 18, 2011

O’Reilly will be offering the ebook version of the RESTful Web Services Cookbook on sale tomorrow (Jan 19, 2011). Here is the scoop I just received from O’Reilly. Save 60% – Top 25 of 2010 Best of Ebook Deal of the Day – http://post.oreilly.com/rd/9z1ztpijtp7meklse9bq1u34nnvf1fdmc1n0battp2g For one day only, you can save 60% on our best [...]

1 comment Read the full article →

Chatty Apps

January 17, 2011

We know that the first practice to speed up performance of a site is to minimize the number of HTTP requests. The same should be true for mobile apps too, but the results I find from some of the apps I commonly use on my iPhone show that the apps have not paid enough attention [...]

2 comments Read the full article →

Best Buys of 2010

January 13, 2011

A Co-Motion Periscope Torpedo and a Jesper Sit Stand Desk

0 comments Read the full article →

App Stores Hurt Publishing and Discovery

January 13, 2011

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales says that "(app stores are) a threat to a diverse and open ecosystem" This is the one of the most profound points I have heard on this topic. In an open ecosystem like the Web, apart from the technical infrastructure that is open and mostly royalty-free, there are two things that are [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Grokked REST?

January 6, 2011

Now-a-days when I look at any REST-related discussion, I find two common problems being debated – how to use hypermedia for managing application state, and how to choose/design media types for representations. These problems may be relevant in enterprise-integration scenarios or when you are just interested in exposing a new interface to clients. However, in [...]

6 comments Read the full article →

Personalized Feeds

January 4, 2011

Despite what the pundits say, feeds are not dead. In fact personalized feeds should get more attention as more users are switching to tablets and apps for a good chunk of their reading. But right now, third party apps can’t read personalized content from content publishers, as those publishers want the user to get out [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →