One of my favorite domains to review in existing applications, because it tends to be so error-ridden, is … error-handling. Too many programmers regard a language’s exception-handling syntax as a solution rather than just a mechanism, so error-handling tends to be misguided or at least neglected. A little more attention in this area often pays […]

Is it OK to use WebSockets? Absolutely. Why, then, reader Klaas Hemstra wonders, did I write in “The Dangers of HTML5: WebSockets and Stable Standards” that the WebSocket protocol is an “unstable spec”? The short answer is that this was the best I know in March 2011 when I wrote these words; the preceding hyperlink […]

IT industry trends this year are all aiming towards one goal – accessibility. We’ve all heard the phrase ‘cloud’ tossed around a few hundred times this year, and the phrase ‘private cloud’ has just recently stepped on the scene. However, the newer trends surrounding these phrases are anything but dull or regurgitated. 2016 is proving […]

“Three main choices for advanced communications in HTML5“, which I posted two months ago, excluded one obvious candidate for “advanced communications”: HTML5‘s server-sent events (SSE). To my surprise, no reader asked me why. Despite this, it’s time to explain SSEs, why I didn’t mention them earlier, and why they are particularly interesting for real-user monitors […]

“Real User Monitoring” has probably convinced you by now that application performance is both important and inadequate; so what do you do about it? Accurate measurement and identification of a problem is the first step, of course. When you’re ready for the second step, here are three quite different approaches you can apply with proven […]

Ready for the future? “Warming Ocean Threatens Sea Life” is it. It’s not the climate change content of the article on which I’m focused at the moment; that’s a topic for another day. More singular, and worthy of our attention now, is that this article is the first in Scientific American to be accompanied by […]

Linux dominates cloud computing. While explanations for this abound–everything from licensing to operating-system design has been cited–the bare fact is uncontroversial. PowerShell, though, especially in its 4.0 release, makes Windows Server competitive in a way I’ve seen no one outside Redmond adequately credit. I should make clear a bit of my own background first: Unix […]

Andrew McHugh is right to contrast the protagonists in his “Fight for the Future: HTML5 vs. Native Apps“. The details, though … about those, I’m less convinced. McHugh and I agree on several essentials: the choice between HTML5 and native is an important one; seamless, continuous updating of Web applications is a crucial part of […]

You’re monitoring a particular server for particular behavior–maybe patterns of filesystem usage, or the appearance in database server logs of specific faults, or cycles of CPU (central processing unit) usage. You’ve already scripted a little bash or PowerShell report that helps make sense of the events. It’s mildly tedious, though, to have to log in […]

HTML5 provides an overwhelming variety of communication methods. Let’s map them out. By “overwhelming”, I don’t mean “poorly-designed” or “unusable”; I just mean that Web developers and network operators have relatively little experience in the full range of facilities modern browsers embed, and it’s easy for all the novelties to disorient all but the specialist. […]