Alistair Croll on Ajax

Because of my particular interest in software performance optimization and SLM, I often search the Web to see what people are writing about performance. And even though there are always new things to find, it seems to be getting harder to locate them.

One reason is that until recently, anyone writing about the performance of computer systems or applications was discussing SLM topics like speed, availability, optimization, capacity planning, or load testing. But in the last few years, as the Web has made information systems and business systems synonymous, the term performance has gradually taken on a much broader meaning. Now to locate the interesting links, I have to include technical keywords that are designed to filter out unwanted information about business success.

So when I do find something worth reading, I assume it's a good idea to make a note of it, to save someone else the trouble. I have already included the most useful references in my previous posts about the performance of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), but yesterday I found this excellent blog post by Alistair Croll of Coradiant on the impact of AJAX on web operations. From there, I also located his related presentation on Ajax and Networks to Interop in December 2005.

Finding this material was a complete coincidence, in that I happen to be attending Interop 2006 in Las Vegas this week, yet I found that link independently. But it was a good very thing to know about, because on Wednesday I am speaking at the WebOps Summit (scroll down to Wednesday for details), which is chaired by none other than ... Alistair Croll. And I have actually devoted the last third of my talk on Best Practices to the emerging RIA measurement issues I discussed here. Even though I have been researching and writing about the performance implications of Ajax and RIA's in general, and scheduling this Interop presentation with Alistair, I had still missed this connection.

This illustrates just how hard it is these days to stay on top of any topic being discussed online. So I hope this post will help you in that regard. And if I make any new connections worth sharing this week, I'll be writing about them when I get a chance. The cover of the conference guides say Interop Makes You Smart, so I'm hoping that works on me. Those marketing slogans are always true, aren't they?