Posts tagged Platform
HP Aims to Redefine Apps Performance Testing with Cloud Platform
Feb 7th
When mobile users feel they don’t like how their apps perform after the first trial, some 75% of them won’t launch the app again. That’s the metric cited by engineers and marketers at HP Software, who note that this first wave of mobile apps brought forth by the iPhone has resulted in a glut of programs that make even the best performing mobile hardware into a pocket full of silicon cement.
This morning, HP begins a repurposing of the performance testing tools for Web sites that it gained through the Mercury Interactive acquisition of 2006, for the mobile apps era. It’s unveiling what it calls “LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud,” complete with hyphens. It will act as an off-premise testing platform for mobile apps that are deployed as services, simulating the activity generated by thousands of users simultaneously to gauge the resilience of servers and resources. This way, you might not have to disappoint three-fourths of them to learn how well your service holds up.
Sponsor
Better scalability through experimentation
“The application architecture itself is the performance bottleneck nine out of ten times,” says Matt Morgan, HP Software’s global senior director of solutions marketing, in an interview with RWW. “By monitoring these services and knowing how long a transaction spends waiting for a data retrieval or a logic process, or some other storage function to occur, you can pinpoint the modules inside the service that have the most potential to slow an application under load. You can find out which services are not scaling.”
When applications are deployed on PaaS platforms such as Heroku and Windows Azure, Morgan says, a great deal of the complexity of how the software interfaces with the hardware is abstracted into obscurity. The architectural concept that I dubbed composite applications in 1991 has expanded to a seemingly unmanageable number of tiers. With the shift to mobile architecture, much of the burden of providing performance has shifted off of the front-end client, and onto the server. And in-between those two tiers are any number of platforms. “So this idea that the software is a composition, gets even more complicated,” he remarks.
“We correlate the front-end story to the back-end problem. And if you think about just the complexities of performance monitoring, if you don’t do correlation, you can end up with an enormous collection of logs and metrics that don’t actually mean anything to the tester,” he continues. “The tester really cares about, how many users can the system support, and what will these users experience when they do concurrently hit their system?”
Mobile apps typically break at some point, and Morgan notes, they don’t bend very much before they do. Maybe an app performs well with 300 simultaneous users, and then fails completely at 325. So LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud (hereafter LRC) finds the breaking point, which is typically somewhere. Once that’s done, it relies upon feedback provided by a vast network of back-end monitors, probing such factors as SQL queries, server metrics, and diagnoses of the method calls being invoked inside the service. “By correlating how much time it takes for a transaction to hit these things, you can actually attain a pretty clear picture, and start to show that the areas of your application that are causing problems have a distinct performance impact.”
The protocol HP uses for emulating user activity in AJAX Web applications, called TruClient, is explained in this video. TruClient has been extended for LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud.
Identifying your app by how and where it breaks
The result is a kind of “stress footprint” that characterizes the resilience state of your mobile app. The space in which this footprint appears is the scenario, which is LRC’s term for a repeatable test. Each test helps establish a firm baseline, which is then replicated identically for different problem sets – different numbers of users. This way you’re testing how the same code scales up, including with each increment – LRC adds test users on an incremental scale, not logarithmic. “You’re trying to determine, if the exact same actions take place on the server, do things improve with the change?” says the HP senior director. “Scenarios allow you to digitize that load, creating a one-click re-execution capability, which is very important in an iterative world. You run your load test, you identify your problem, you make your change, and you go back to your scenario and run the exact same test.”
Overlaying the results gives you your best metric as to performance, which in a cloud-based scenario is indeed capable of improving with incrementally added users.
Results from previous load tests, including with earlier builds of your apps, are recorded as snapshots. New test results can be overlaid atop these earlier ones, in order to determine what code changes made the biggest impact. “We give you the capability to leverage that information inside of an operational monitoring solution, but if you wanted to monitor a Web or mobile app going forward for functionality, and you want to have visibility to the way it should run, you can use the metrics from LoadRunner to compare against what it’s actually doing in production. That gives you the snapshot of the lab world, where everything works, to the production world where everything’s real.”
LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud is being offered now to HP partners in the U.S. and Canada, and will be rolled out through OEM partners on their own timetables. Pricing will be determined by the party making the sale.
No, no, not that Lode Runner! Somebody get our graphics department off the Apple II and replace this!
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Flurry Adds HTML5 to Mobile Analytics Platform
Feb 1st
Mobile analytics and monetization platform Flurry is adding a new vertical to it platform offering today. Recognizing the coming growth of mobile Web apps, Flurry will begin tracking HTML5 mobile Web apps starting with a beta software developer kit today.
Flurry supports five other mobile platforms. That includes BlackBerry, iOS, Android, Windows Phone and J2ME. Flurry notes a recent survey by Kony that says that 74% of Fortune 500 companies were planning on some type of HTML5 integration. That does not mean those companies will replace their native apps though, with only 7% saying that HTML5 would supplant native applications. In an ecosystem that is becoming increasingly diverse, Flurry is making sure it can be everything to everybody.
Sponsor
Flurry is one of the companies that is directly benefiting from the explosive growth of the mobile app ecosystem. Since launching in 2008 the sessions that Flurry tracks have doubled every six months. At the end of 2011, the company had tracked more than 240 billion sessions.
“It took Flurry a full two years, from August 2008 to August 2010, to track one hundred million daily sessions,” said Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf in a release. “Now we’re adding another hundred million daily sessions every three weeks.”
Flurry is now used by 60,000 developers with 150,000 apps in its publisher network. Overall, that works to about 15% of all apps published to the variety of platforms. Flurry’s VP of marketing Peter Farango said in an email that the company predicts that Flurry analytics is embedded in one out of every three downloads from the Android Market, Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore etc.
“We are officially a very big, big data company,” Farango said.
Flurry’s growth threatens to overshadow some of the other players in the mobile analytics field like Kontagent, Localytics and Apsalar. Flurry has a head start and has become a popular free offering for many developers looking for an SDK to track analytics in their apps. That is not to say that Flurry is a one-stop shop for all of your analytics needs, but the company has a forward looking approach that can fit well for many developers.
What is your view on Flurry? Do you use them for analytics or monetization purposes? How does the company stack up to the competition in overall quality of service? Let us know your experience in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Enterprise SEO Platform Ginzametrics Announces API Partnership with SEOmoz … – Sacramento Bee
Jan 27th
|
Enterprise SEO Platform Ginzametrics Announces API Partnership with SEOmoz …
Sacramento Bee 26, 2012 — /PRNewswire/ — Ginzametrics, an innovative enterprise-level SEO management and analytics dashboard, announced today an API partnership with SEO developer SEOmoz's Site Intelligence Service API. Through the API, Ginzametrics now possesses … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Enterprise SEO Platform Ginzametrics Announces API Partnership with SEOmoz … – MarketWatch (press release)
Jan 26th
|
Enterprise SEO Platform Ginzametrics Announces API Partnership with SEOmoz …
MarketWatch (press release) 26, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Ginzametrics, an innovative enterprise-level SEO management and analytics dashboard, announced today an API partnership with SEO developer SEOmoz's Site Intelligence Service API. Through the API, Ginzametrics now … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO Website Provider, WebFindYou, Unveils New Features to Its Web and SEO Platform – MarketWatch (press release)
Jan 24th
|
SEO Website Provider, WebFindYou, Unveils New Features to Its Web and SEO Platform
MarketWatch (press release) MIAMI, FL, Jan 24, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — SEO Website provider and expert Search Engine Optimization Company, WebFindYou, releases yet another enhancement to its Web and SEO Platform, the WebFindYou Platform, which provides companies and small … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Appstores.com: The Platform That Wants To Run Your Niche App Store
Jan 19th
App discoverability is one of the biggest problems facing mobile publishers these days. That is especially true for HTML5 developers publishing apps to the mobile Web. A San Francisco-based startup wants to help. Appstores.com today is announcing mobile app distribution network to help developers make their apps more discoverable and profitable.
Sponsor
Publishers will now be given the ability to have their own niche app stores that can be curated with up to a million apps across iOS, Android and HTML5. Publishers will also have the capability of advertising their apps in the network with HTML5 mobile ads. The big idea here is the notion of the network. Publishers can band together to showcase their apps across categories and app repositories, increasing visibility across the platform.
The notion of Appstores.com is intriguing not for what it is, but what it could become. By giving developers and publishers a platform to curate their own app stores, Appstores.com has the potential to create several high profile app repositories that cloud transcend the platform itself. For instance, a gaming studio could create its own app store to sell its Android, iOS and HTML5 apps and make partnership deals with other publishers to include their games as well.
The idea is intriguing. The key phrase for the platform will be “powered by Appstores.com.” The startup itself does not need to be another third-party app store like Getjar or the Amazon Android Appstore but positions itself to be a platform, giving the power to the developer the create the network. Appstores.com will supply HTML5 ads of apps that can cross individual apps stores as well as a dashboard for developers to claim their apps and submit them to individual stores. The dashboard also has basic analytics for views, clicks and installs from across the network. Appstores.com has already logged almost every iOS and Android app into its library which means that developers can just sign up and claim their app.
The initial rollout partners are distinctly of the niche variety. The first five to launch are HelloBrit.com, CreativeDigitalMusic.com FabFitFun.com, OutDoorzy.com and iPhoneGames.com.
In terms of the HTML5 ad network, initial partners are 9GAG, TheNextWeb, WPtouch and local news aggregator Topix.
Developers: Can you see yourself claiming your app on Appstores.com? Or are you going to host your own app repository? What benefits can you see with the Appstores.com’s model? Detriments? Let us know in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
WebiMax Enters in to Strategic Partnership With Leading Ecommerce Platform … – PR Web (press release)
Jan 16th
 PR Web (press release) |
WebiMax Enters in to Strategic Partnership With Leading Ecommerce Platform …
PR Web (press release) “Our partnership with WebiMax joins two industry leaders and helps us enhance our products by adding additional SEO technologies to our state-of-the-art e-commerce platform,” states Dana Greaves, CEO and President of Vortx, Inc. and AspDotNetStorefront … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
People are Already Talking about Linkbuilding.org on the Facebook® Platform – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Jan 7th
|
People are Already Talking about Linkbuilding.org on the Facebook® Platform
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) LinkBuilding Company, an seo link building company that provides link building services and helps clients climb the search engine rankings using link building seo services, announced today that after creating a Facebook platform page a week ago, … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
IBM Promises to Keep Green Hat’s Platform Support Open, Broad-based
Jan 5th
For several years, a company called Green Hat (not associated with Red Hat) has been in the business of creating sophisticated software testing equipment for developers, particularly for service-oriented applications that use messaging queues. The problem with distributed application testing is that it’s getting more and more complicated, especially as a multitude of new and independently evolving frameworks introduce dependencies that can’t always be accurately simulated in a test environment.
So yesterday’s acquisition of Green Hat by IBM brought up an interesting question: Will a company whose test environments were developed to support Oracle, Java Message Service, SAP, Software AG, and TIBCO as well as WebSphere MQ continue to do so after being acquired by the maker of WebSphere MQ? Today, we have the answer.
Sponsor
In a statement to ReadWriteWeb, the director of product management and strategy for IBM’s Rational division – whose umbrella will now cover Green Hat’s tools as well – said IBM plans to keep Green Hat’s support broadly-based.
“We have every intention of maintaining and extending the existing Green Hat support for multiple applications, protocols, formats, and the like,” Charles Chu tells RWW. “A primary value of Green Hat is its ability to help manage the challenge of application testing in a complex world. In this sense, expanding the support for ever [greater] levels of complexity is part of our core mission.”
The way organizations often build distributed applications is by delegating responsibility for the individual components to separate teams. While ideally it would be nice for all of those teams to cooperate on scheduling, in practice components end up with at varying stages of completion for any one point in time. For this reason, when one development team needs to test the viability of a component intended to communicate with other components that may not even exist yet, the team utilizes a testing environment that can create stubs – substitute components that can interact with the ones being tested in a realistic manner.
The crown jewel of Green Hat’s test automation suite has been GH Tester. Historically, it’s been used to rapidly generate stubs that can respond to Web services using messaging protocols like SOAP or JMS. Because Web services must behave in a more protocol-agnostic fashion, testing suites like GH Tester must be more open to multiple platforms – which is why the support question for Green Hat and platforms like .NET is so important.
More recently, though, Green Hat has been working toward weaning GH Tester from the use of stubs, and toward a more sophisticated system of virtualized applications it calls GH Virtual Integration Environment (VIE). Rather than a stub, VIE generates a component that truly is an application, responding more logically and believably to a component’s request using logic that’s adaptable to a variety of test scenarios.
As Green Hat explains, “GH VIE is part of the GH Tester suite, not another ‘product,’ so when GH Tester starts a test, it can automatically start the necessary virtualized applications to go with it, ensuring that unresolved system dependencies can be satisfied. The user is in control of which virtualized applications are used, allowing a wide variety of different situations to be modeled, depending on the testing scenario.”
IBM is now calling the VIE scenario “testing in the cloud.” At the moment, Green Hat may not technically be “as-a-service,” though it’s conceivable that as its portfolio is integrated into IBM Rational, VIE functionality could be offered at some point in the future through a cloud portal.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Turn Your WiFi Network Into A Twitter-Like Private Messaging Platform
Jan 3rd
Internet users usually think of Wi-Fi networks as either open (hey, let’s steal Internet from our neighbor instead of paying for it!) or closed (only those with a password can access the Internet). If you leave your network open, how often do you actually know the people who are also logged on?
Wifis.org, a new site created and operated by Berlin-based Mathias Nitzsche and “Robert,” turns your WiFi network into a contact form of sorts, making you accessible to others via private messages that are transmitted through your WiFi network. To create an account on WiFis.org, login using your Facebook or Google account.
Sponsor
After you have logged on account, go to your wireless router or modem and change your Wi-Fi network’s name (SSID). This won’t change anything about the service itself.
Should Wi-Fi networks be more social? WiFis.org seems like it might be more useful for a Wi-Fi network you would access while traveling. Take the case of hotel lobbies, for instance. If anything, you may want to stop sharing your files with others in the lobby, but you still may want to find some way to connect with people around you in a less-than-awkward fashion.
WiFis.org is not designed for the hotel experience, however. It’s best for the everyday home Wi-Fi user who might not know who their neighbors are, and might actually want to.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
