I'm looking for a script/code that slows down the load time of a website. It might sound stupid but it's needed. I've tried with javascript...html codes.. .htaccess file and yeah.. I'm out of ideas. Im using a webshoes who's using "nginx". Anyone who has an idea? I feel very stupid now for asking. :P
So my goal is that when the client is hitting the enter key to visit example.com the website that shows up is going to simulate slow internet speed or something in that style. English is not my natvie language so I have a hard time to find the correct words to use..sorry for that.
Your question is so broad I can only give a broad answer.
Javascript would not be the best choice IMHO as it executes client-side. You IMPLY you want to slow things down on the server side.
You don't say which web server you're running and therefore which server-side scripting languages are available to you (e.g. php, C# via ASP.NET, etc.), but one thing you might try is figuring that out, then scripting a web page with built-in delays via functions such as the C# and php sleep() methods. This will cause the web server to pause as it generates the page.
Again, because your question is so broad, I can't give a more specific answer. My goal here is to point you toward something you can specifically do on the server side that we KNOW will slow things down.
The understanding here is that you are going to have a client hit the page that has the slowdown calls built in. If you're trying to do something more "nefarious", like simulating a stress test of the server by running it low on memory or CPU, those types of situations can slow down a server too, but are beyond the scope of this answer. You can Google stress testing tools; you'll want to have at least a basic grasp of system monitoring tools for your platform (Windows, Linux, etc.) as well if this is the path you're heading down.
Related
I have been following the usage of JavaScript for the past few years, and with the release of extremely fast scripting engines (V8, SquirrelFish Extrene, TraceMonkey, etc.) the possibilities of JavaScript have increased dramatically. However, the usage share of Internet Explorer coupled with it's total lack of support for recent standards makes me want to drop a bomb on Microsoft's HQ, as it creates a huge amount of problems for any website.
The game will need to be pretty dynamic client-side, with animations and other eye-candy things, but not a full-blown game like those that run directly in the OS using DirectX or OpenGL. However, this might be a little stretch for JavaScript and will certainly feel extremely slow in Internet Explorer (given that the current IE engine can be hundreds of times slower than SFX; gotta see what IE9 will bring), would it be better to just do the whole thing in Flash? I know this means requiring the plug-in AND I have no experience whatsoever with Flash (other than browsing YouTube :P). It also means I can't just output directly from PHP, I would have to use XML or some other format to pass data to it (JSON is directly integrated in JS and PHP can deal with it easily).
Another idea would be to provide an alternative interface just for IE, though I don't know how (ActiveX maybe? or with Flash, then why not just provide it to all browsers) or totally not supporting it and requiring the use of other browsers, although this is plain stupid from a business perspective.
So here am I, wondering what approach to take and thus asking for your advice. How should I build the client-side? AJAX in all browsers, Flash in all browsers or a mix (AJAX for "modern" browsers and something else for the "grandpa": IE).
I recommend a plug-in platform (Flash, Silverlight, or Java) over AJAX. Having a clean layer of abstraction between your game and the client's browser is a big advantage. In any non-trivial AJAX game look forward to endless corner-cases where browsers differ in performance or implementation.
Personally, I think Flash is easy to learn if you are coming from AJAX experience. Flash is currently the most widely installed and proven plug-in for browser games. However, Silverlight and Java are both building momentum. Also, the Unity engine has become a popular choice for commercial browser games.
I think you shouldn't leave Java out of the equation. It's a powerful, fast language, and with Java applets, you can do almost anything. If you want hardware-accelerated graphics via OpenGL, JOGL can do it, even in an applet.
On the other hand, it might not be right for you. But at this early stage, I think you should evaluate all of your options, and since you have no experience with Flash but sound like you've got a bit of programming experience, you might feel more at-home with Java.
I believe the current answer is Flash game.
Alternatives:
Java Applet: getting less and less common those days and it is not commonly installed as a plugin on many computers.
SilverLight: too new and might vary and change in time. not commonly installed on many computers and it's Microsoft (whom tends to change technology every 2 years ...)
JavaScript / AJAX: Still a new kid on the block, it's on the rise it is true with many nice features, but still lack of good cross browser for IE even IE8, can not play sounds internally, still slower than the others, and you don't know where will it evolves.
Eventually probably the best solution for now is Flash development:
Cross platform. Works fast. Long time already alive and have a lot of support.
I hope this answer will change in the next year. Happy Peasach.
Check out Jmonkey. The "plugin" loads if you have Java on your machine. Once it's cached, the next time the visitor goes to the page, it your game loads very quick. Check out their website for demos and see what I mean: http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/
Oh, I forgot to say, it's a 3D scenegraph Java engine. I just tried it again, and it loaded in linux. Looks they've put in some good work.
Don't do it with javascript in the browser. And Flash really can be a pain just because it's closed source and you don't know if you've made a mistake or found a bug - speaking from experience. I'd never want to make another Flash game again.
How about using RaphaelJs , it is a Javascript library that make dinamyc images using SVG, and for IE, it try to make those images using the IE alternative: VML. Im using it on my own WebGame, but i dont really make complex graphics in it. The most complex thing done on RapahelJs was a heath map (20 * 20 tiles ) with a dinamyc opacity slider. An it work with jquery without any problem or configuration!
YSlow, dynaTrace, HTTPWatch, Fiddler .........
All these things are really good for measuring the performance of the website and get statistics for the same. YSlow is really cool, offers good guidelines also.
However, i am very confused with so many things around (Though it's good that people already invested time and have made nice guidelines to follow and i thank them for great work done).
Following are my questions:
How much accuracy these tools have in terms or numbers they show ?
Which one(tool) is BEST to use (one for all needs)? Or i am missing name of some tool which is out of box and better than above all?
I'm suprised that you haven't mentioned JMeter. It is free, quite easy to use, has lots of features, and great for load testing your website.
As for question one, I'm not sure I can answer that. I'm sure that in general, the numbers these tools show are pretty accurate, but there are some catches. Take JMeter for example:
JMeter itself uses a lot of memory and also some substantial CPU time if you do some heavy load testing. That means that if you run the tool on the same machine as your website, some resources are lost, e.g. not available for the website
Testing it on the same machine does not out-of-the-box take in account that the data has to be sent over the internet connection, so response times are lower then the reality.
But in all, I think you should never blindly trust the results these tools give you, but they can give you a good insight into possible bottlenecks or problems.
YSlow is good to measure performance for a single user. Try to keep it grade A and it will be OK. But it actually doesn't measure performance in case of multiple concurrent users. For that you can use under each Apache JMeter. It's a good webserver/webapplication stresstest tool. So I would say, just use both YSlow (for client performance) and JMeter (for server performance).
I haven't used DynaTrace before, so I'll skip that part. The mentioned HTTP request trackers doesn't really measure performance, they are more debuggers.
As far as I am concerned, i find YSlow to be really good (have tried fiddler too) and it does help me when i need it and i do believe that it provides the correct figures thereby making me use that in the time ahead too unless there is anything unanimously accepted (which is difficult because everyone has different choices and requirements.) or even better. Oh they are right, forgot the JMeter, something you should definitely give a mention.
There is also Speed Tracer extension for Chrome. It should be usable with any JavaScript heavy website.
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/speedtracer/
http://gtmetrix.com is a good tool and it is free. that analyzes your page's speed performance using Page Speed and YSlow
Does anyone know of any tools out there that will let me run and debug a VXML application visually? There are a ton of VXML development tools, but they all require you to build your application within them.
I have an existing application that uses JSPs to generate VXML, and I'm looking for a way to navigate through and debug the rendered VXML in much the same way that Firebug allows one to do this with HTML. I have some proxy-like tools that let me inspect the rendered code as it is sent to the VXML browser, but there's a ton of JS, which makes traversing the code by hand rather difficult.
Has anyone worked with a product that allows for this?
Thanks!
IVR Avenger
There is JigSaw Test suite - has free trial license and reasonably priced.
There is IBM's debugger - part of WebSphere Voice Toolkit.
Many other products have debuggers - a very good summary is here
Disclaimer: I am the development manager for Voiyager (www.voiyager.com), a VoiceXML testing tool. It doesn't meet your criteria nor do I believe it is the type of tool you want, but I thought it was worth mentioning it.
As far as I know, there isn't such a test tool for VoiceXML. In fact there are very few VoiceXML tools on the market and hardly any of them test or analysis. The vendors that created development tools, have all been acquired by other companies. Some of them offered did offer various forms of debugging that were specific to their tool set or stayed at the Dialog (caller input) level. From your question, I'm assuming you need much lower level debugging capabilities.
I think the alternative paths are minimal and somewhat difficult. I believe your primary goal is to debug or rewrite an existing application, but you haven't provided any specific challenges beyond the JavaScript. Some thoughts or approaches that may help:
Isolate the JavaScript and place the code into a unit test harness. That will go a long way to understanding the logic of the application. Any encapsulation of the JavaScript you perform will probably go a long way towards better code maintainability.
Attempt to run the VoiceXML through a translation layer to HTML so you could use FireBug. The largest challenge would involve caller input (ie processing the SRGS grammars). You could probably cheat this by just having the form accept a JSON string the populates the field values. There are tools on the market to test grammars. Depending on the nature of your problems, you could take a simple and light approach and attempt this over just the trouble areas.
Plumb the application with a lot of logging. This can be done through the VoiceXML LOG element, or push the variable space back to the server. By adding intermediate forms, you may be able to provide a dump from each via the VoiceXML Data element.
See if your application will run in one of the open source VoiceXML browsers (not sure of the state of the open source browsers as we've built and bought for our various product lines). If you can get it mostly working, you can use the development debugger to provide some ability to step through the logic. However, it is probably one of the more difficult paths as you'll really need to understand the browser to know when and where to stick your breakpoints and to figure out how to expose the data you want.
Good luck on the challenge. If you find another approach, I would be interested in seeing it posted.
An alternative debug env is to use something like Asterisk with a voicexml browser plugin like the one from http://www.voiceglue.org/ or for a limited licence, i6net.
You can keep all the pieces separate(dynamic html and vxml application in php/jsp/j2ee/, tts processing, and optional asr processing as separate virtual machines with something like virtualbox. If the logic can be kept the same, then it is just a matter of changing the UI based on the channel.
A softphone is all you need to call a minimal asterisk machine, which has the voicexml browser with the url of the vxml in the call plan.
I just used Zend Framework as php is used in this environment, and changed view suffixes(phtml vs vxml) based on the user-agent string.
Flite for tts is fine for debugging, and when your app is ready you can either record phrases, and there was a page on the ubuntu forums with directions for how to increase flite quality with some additional sound files.
Do you have tried Eclipse VTP or InVision Studio?
Eclipse VTP
This is Eclipse plugin. But I feel that it is user-unfriendly a little (of Japanese viewpoint).
InVision Studio *Required create user account*
This is Convergys's IVR tool. It has to edit standard VXML mode. (Unfortunately, It's not exact matching.)
For just debugging vxml, I use Nuance Cafe's VoiceXML checker. It doesn't give you a visual tree or anything, but it's pretty good at spotting syntax errors and is free. I think they might also have more advanced debugging tools if you look into it, but I haven't had the need. (Note: I have no association with them)
http://cafe.bevocal.com/tools/vxmlchecker/vxmlchecker.jsp
I'm looking for the same problem that most of the links are down. I found a document where they propose an open source solution, which works as a plugin for Asterisk (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228873959_Open_Source_VoiceXML_Interpreter_over_Asterisk_for_Use_in_IVR_Applications) and is available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/voxy/
I would like to know if there are current options to create a VXML structure graphically, like the next image.
Background
I'm at the planning stages of a DIY project that'll help me automate some hardware at my house. It's probably also worthwhile to mention that I've got almost no experience with web-related development.
The Basics
http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/4706/drawingo.png -- I can't seem to embed the diagram.
In order to simplify management, I want to implement my UI in the browser.
The meat of my application will reside inside a Windows service or Linux daemon; this does not mean, however, that I'm after a cross-platform solution -- I'm not tied to any particular platform, so I'll pick one (probably based on the responses that I get) and stick with it.
I would prefer to use "free" tools (e.g., LAMP/WAMP), but it's not a deal breaker.
It would be nice to be able to communicate back to the user that some action is in progress (I think AJAX would be one way to go?)
Questions
The only thing that's not entirely clear to me is the implementation of step № 3. I'd like to hear possible implementation ideas (on Windows or Linux) as to how this should be done. Hopefully some of you can share how this sort of thing is done in the real world.
Miscellaneous
As always, if there's a problem with my thinking, please point it out!
There are many people better qualified to help with step 3 so I'll leave that to them.
My question is whether is you are looking forward to learning the mess of web technologies required for the front end or consider it a necessary evil on the way to what you really want to accomplish? If the latter (and assuming you are working in C/C++) consider taking a look at WT. It's a toolkit that makes the developing the web interface seem more like a desktop gui while handling much of the ugliness for you. It could potentially cut a lot of time off your development.
I'm having trouble deciding if I want a project of mine to be web-based (as in a web-app), desktop-based (a desktop application), or a desktop application that can sync or connect to the cloud.
I don't know if anyone else would have an interest in this application, and it's only going to be for me, so I'm leaning toward desktop application. If, for some reason, I finish it, release it, and people actually like it, I might see about making it sync to the cloud as well (think v2). But I'm not sure how hard it is to make such a radical change, and I don't want to end up with something good that is useless because I made a poor choice before I even started the project.
Is there any sort of guidance for this? Any rules of thumb or best practices? Any personal experiences?
If the language matters, I'm thinking about Java simply because I'm most comfortable with it, and it would easily allow me to share it with my friends for testing and if I get stuck and need help from someone else in person.
I generally ask a few questions:
Can it even be done on the web? Something I did not too long ago involved an image editing component, and had to be a web app. It involved much pain to get this work, and a desktop app would have been a far better way to go.
Will I need to access it from anywhere? Yeah you could load it up on a thumb drive, but the web is far more feasible in this case.
Will there be multiple users? This could go either way, but "long tail" stuff usually means web.
What tech do you want to use? The latest and greatest WPF based UI? Desktop (yeah yeah, silverlight, let's not go there ok?). The brain dead stupid easy user management of Django or others? Web.
If it were a web app, will you need to worry about common attack vectors like SQL Injection, XSS, etc? A desktop app has its own issues here too, but tend to have less exposure.
How resource intensive is it? Will 10 users kill performance of a web server?
Versioning on the desktop can be a pain, whereas with a webapp everyone is on the same version. This can bite you though, see the New Facebook user pushback.
EDIT:
Cost can be a factor too. A web app with a database backend typically means a web server. If you want to stick with, say, the Microsoft Stack, you'll need licenses for SQL Server which can get pricey. Open source is cheaper, but may not be an option in all cases. "Serving" a desktop app is generally cheaper.
If you release as a web-app, you won't have to port it over. You'll also have access to it wherever you go.
I base my choice on the GUI mostly. If the GUI is going to be complex, and (needs to be fast or will have aspects of it that will take a lot of time to process) then I will go with the Desktop. If it is simple, and will always have small data sets to work with at once, the I will go with the Web.
I have worked on an app that was made as a web app, when clearly it was better suited for the desktop. It was a massive failure. I don't know HOW customers put up with it, cause I certainly wouldn't have used it. The desktop version (which took over 6 months to re-write) blew the web version out of the water.
That being said, I have seen some nice web apps.
All I can suggest are several factors that would be relevant. How you determine the answer and weight for the factor is up to you and other circumstances:
What is your audience? Do you have any control over them?
How complex are the interactions you expect to implement?
Do you require near real-time data updates?
How often do you expect to update the application after the first release?
Do you expect a well-defined set of client platforms, or can you not predict that?
Note that your choices also can include a Java WebStart application, which mitigates some of the disadvantages of a typical desktop application.
I'd say that most applications should be desktop-based. The advantages are faster and more fluid apps.
You should only create a web application if there are obvious benefits from it, like access from everywhere. (If that's necessary for your app.)
A downside of web applications can also be that it is dependent on the developer, if you quit supporting it all your users (if you'll have any) can't use it anymore. Furthermore, there is a chance that users are not willing to store their data online.
Ultimately it depends on what kind of an application you want to write. Even if you create it as a desktop-app, you can later on rewrite it for the web. Often a 2.0 version of software needs almost complete rewriting anyway.
Sometime web can be good and sometime not. We are in a new wave that go in the web but do not forget few things:
GUI in web is more complicated because of multiple browser
People who need to work on your system might not like working the whole day in a browser
Web can be slower for some application (image editing, hard job that require a lot of CPU)
Rapid Gui like Visual Studio for winform are faster than for web
But web has many advantage in the deployement and in the portability. If your system is well structured you could make both or change to one to other later with something build with MVC. Just change your visual and you will be fine.
If this were an application to be used my multiple users, with shared data, you're probably going to want a server anyway. In that case I'd lean towards a web application.
Otherwise you've got the complexity of syncing data between the desktop and a server.
Two important questions not on the list so far:
Will the first version have any features that need lowish-level access to hardware?
Will future versions have any featuers that need lowish-level access to hardware?
It's pretty easy to answer the first one, but giving the second one some thought can save you some headache down the road.
My default choice is to go with a web solution, as it's easier to deploy and generally multi-platform. The only time I go with winforms apps is when there are pressing security, performance, or functionality issues that require it.
Previously you'd have written a desktop application, as tool were better for that and you'd have written it faster. People used to want web apps, but always ended up with desktop.
Nowadays things are different, you can write a webservice just as quickly and easily so there's no reason not to go web-based.
The advantages of web-based are flexibility, scalability and ease of deployment. It won't be as responsive as a desktop app could be, but that's not so much of an issue if you think about your design.