Jeff Findlay, Senior Solutions Architect – APJ, Micro Focus, talks to Pankaj Maru about the new technology trends impacting the Internet. Excerpts:
The Internet is witnessing remarkable changes, with a rising shift towards mobility. What key technology trends do you observe today?
In the past few years, AJAX or Web2.0 type frameworks are becoming much more significant. Applications from thick clients have moved to web browsers but still need to maintain functionality. And the only way they can really maintain functionality is to work with AJAX frameworks so that the user can only see a small amount of transactions between the browser and the web server.
For instance, when a user opens a website, selects a country and depending on the country, the site will show a list of states from that particular country. So from a user perspective, it’s just one
transaction but from the browser stand point, there are many transactions happening behind the scenes between the browser, web server and application server.
And this behaviour varies from one browser to another. We are addressing this change automatically by taking away the complexity of Web 2.0 frameworks, so people don’t need to worry about computer or transactional layer, as we can provide one script that can run against any browser. This significantly cuts down the amount of scripting and the scripting load, which is estimated to be around 80%, can be reduced.
How is Micro Focus dealing with these technology trends and challenges today?
Because now we are getting into ‘one browser many devices,’ the browser needs to perform on desktop, Android, iOS and other devices; this is adding another type of complexity. Beside, HTML5 is adding one more complexity layer on the browser. Though it hasn’t taken off well as per expectations, it is picking up now and we believe it to become much more pervasive.
We are looking at being able to identify ‘one script any device’ which allows creating one script for multiple functions and can run against any browser and device. But again, the native applications
or apps on devices also adds a layer of complexity. Given this, native app developers for Android platform are adding HTML5 to some extent and making hybrid applications.
However, it will need different client-compilers for Windows, Android and other OS phones. Hence, from a testing perspective, as a tools vendor we have to work very hard to be able to cope up with this new technology change. And we are certainly doing that actively with our goal of ‘one script any device’ and are well on the road to do that.
From the business perspective, all we want to have is a unified user experience, which from performance point is quiet difficult. Because earlier, people were only working on desktops and now they are comparing with their mobile devices and expect relative performance speed. Today, people have Android tablets or iPads, where they are clicking on all buttons and are online all the time, so they expectapplications to have high response times. So users expect that their enterprise or corporate applications too respond at the same speed on mobile devices as well as in the browser.
Hence performance testing itself hasn’t changed but the SLA for speed is continuously increasing which means the application architecture needs to be very finely tuned. And today, performance testing is no more just back end processes but is very integral and important part of software development cycle, that also includes testing for application, web-browser and mobile. With analytics coming in, performance testing has gone to a new level where its not how fast or slow the application is but it includes all other aspects of back-end processes.
With the Internet industry bracing for IPv6 standards, are you seeing any challenges for infrastructure, solutions and service providers as well as content creators?
Everybody is facing challenges and IPv6 is going to change things significantly. However, we are fortunate to use agile methodology for our development during the past 10-12 years. This allows us to release full updates, hot-keys and software releases of our products on regular time intervals, which is why we are able to adopt changes of today.
