The Performance Paradigm of a Mashup World – Tech Session, Day 1

Peter Kirwan of WebMetrics was the presenter of this session. There was a lot of propaganda to sort through (his company offers monitoring services for web applications, among other things), but he talked a lot about one of the few recurring themes in the conference – The lack of security and performance standards in the mashup world. With sites such as iGoogle, PageFlakes, or any other mashups (ad services are also mashups) , your site performance relies on the performance of the applications that you mash together… in other words, if you use a widget from some third party that runs slowly it can bring down your site as well. The same concern holds for security risks when using third party widgets. Often you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes (third parties may be using other third parties, and so on), and that can open up your application to a lot of potential security threats.

Embracing New Platforms

The speaker was Bert Halstead, chief architect for CURL. This presentation was roughly based on a study commissioned by CURL to compare Flex, CURL, AJAX, and .NET on several different aspects such as learning curve, average development time, loading speed, etc by finding teams of developers to duplicate a certain web application for each language. As you could expect, CURL came out on top a few times… with Flex consistently coming out in the middle. I wasn’t very impressed with the survey – it seemed the results were a bit off, especially for development time aspect since apparently they tested teams that had prior knowledge of some of the languages. Basically the point was that there are trade-offs with each method. He also believed that we’re moving towards building more web-enabled applications for the desktop.