I went to a few other session this afternoon that were interesting and informative, but they did not evoke much in the way of a coherent response. Some talk about DBA roles in the DevOps world and talk about Yahoo's issues with their homepage were interesting. In all, I wouldn't say that there was a lot of really new information there for me.

I did want to hit on the short session I attended before calling it a day. I got to see some more of the new features on WebPageTest. The more I see, the more I want this set up at work. The first feature that is only available on private instances (not on webpagetest.org) allows you to determine when the page stops changing. It will even create a weird picture that highlights the area of the page that changes last. With highly dynamic web apps, this could be a really interesting way to determine what is really going on as the page loads. I think you can combine this with the video capture capability and have a reasonable view that can be shown to people without using the tool. I find that one of the biggest issues with training people on these highly dynamic apps is that screenshots in documentation cannot convey the true dynamic nature of the application. These videos can.

The second really cool feature is called replay. You can have the system perform the request(s) you want. Then, you can actually set it up so that it replays the request without actually making any network requests. That way, you can measure the pure browser-side latency impact of the JavaScript, CSS, and DOM structures on your page. This is really cool and will do a lot to help get rid of that network jitter.

I am at Velocity 2011 in Santa Clara, so the next several posts will be coming out of the sessions I'm attending.

My first workshop of the conference was on Web Performance. I learned a bit about some tools I hadn't heard of before (which probably makes me way behind). The basis of most of what I saw was webpagetest.org. This tool gives full client-side page profiles of the pages you are loading. It also provides videos and snapshots of the site as it loads. This is very cool. I even ran it on my quote site. The result is about what I expected. My site is generally good, but it has some issues (cache headers, JS that I pull in from external locations, etc.). Also, the Google +1 widget on the site gave a 301, which is a bit annoying. Luckily, that JS doesn't load until late in the page.

The second tool is Mobitest from Blaze.io. This is based on webpagetest.org, but it works on mobile devices. Their collection of devices seems a bit light right now. Plus, there are always the problems of the mobile platforms being less configurable and tweakable than their full-featured predecessors. Still, a targeted mobile site could get some decent benefits from such a tool.

We also saw showslow.com, which provides a similar type of functionality to webpagestest.org, but it also provides data over time. The continuous nature of the data is really interesting. Plus, it supports YSlow's beacon API, so you can have your browser publish directly there.

All of these integrate in someway with dynaTrace AJAX edition, which is a cool piece of software. The nicest part of dynaTrace is that it actually runs on your machine, so there are no external services to use or set up. WebPageTest and ShowSlow both provide options for cloning it in-house. That's nice, but the setup does not look simple. Plus, there are potential licencing issues whichever way you turn. A quick look at the WebPageTest license file alluded to GPL v3, which may not work for us at work. dynaTrace may be better, though. We'll have to look.

All in all, I saw some cool tools. There looks to be a lot more in this direction over the next couple of days. I'm really looking forward to it.

My next workshop is on big data and NoSQL