Web Performance Matters

Performance Management (SLM) Challenges for Ajax and Rich Internet Applications (RIA's)

In my post on Ajax Wisdom, I reviewed the progress of Ajax against the Gartner Hype Cycle, concluding that Ajax had not yet advanced beyond the Trough of Disillusionment. I referred to Michael Mahemoff's recent post about Ajax concerns as just one piece of evidence.

Michael responded (see the comments) that the mere existence of concerns does not indicate anything, because any viable technology has outstanding problems to be solved. To judge Ajax I should really look at the progress that has already been made in solving problems. So let's do that ...

Performance management challenges

Michael's response is fair comment, based on the content of that one post. I did not devote any space in that post to elaborating on the problems. However, I have done that in many previous posts here about the performance management challenges presented by Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) in general, and Ajax in particular. I have also summarized those issues in my paper on Rich Internet Applications: Design, Measurement and Management Challenges [pdf].

Later I wrote a post summarizing the requirements for reporting on web application responsiveness when applications are implemented using Ajax or other RIA technologies.

I also documented the RIA performance management issues in the wikipedia RIA article, and that summary is virtually unchanged more than 6 months later. In fact, searching anywhere for Ajax performance management produces just a few hits (which I'll review in a separate post).

I consider this to be evidence that Ajax still has a long way to go before it is a suitable platform technology for enterprise applications. As far as I know, the only progress towards implementing service level management (SLM) tools for Ajax has been by performance specialists like Tenni Theurer at Yahoo!, who have built their own custom reporting solutions that massage measurement data produced by other, more detailed, data collection tools.

Development vs. performance management

Such example are not really evidence of Ajax progress, they are quite the opposite. They are proof that software engineers still have to jump through a lot of extra hoops to overcome the problems created by their decision to use Ajax.

While early adopters like Google and Yahoo! are willing to live with such problems, mass adoption will not happen until the engineering and management tools are more complete. To remove the performance management obstacles will require the Web development industry to first agree upon, then implement, standard measurement and reporting protocols. The full solution will require cooperation between:

• development frameworks,
• browsers,
• and measurement tools.

This will not happen until a de facto standard emerges for performance measurement of Ajax applications. Developer tools like the IBM Page Detailer and the Mozilla FireBug extension are great as far as they go, but they do not address the need for routine performance measurement and management capabilities. And until Ajax has those, I believe it is still a long way away from the Plateau of Productivity.

Tags: Ajax, RIA, Rich Internet Application, Performance Management, Performance Measurement, SLM, Hype Cycle, FireBug, IBM Page Detailer