Best Practices of Web Service Performance Testing

Sergei Baranov's article in Sys-Con WebSphere Journal gives a good overview of what's going on for Web Service performance testing in practice.

• Performance Testing Web Services, by Sergei Baranov, Sep. 28, 2004.

His article provides strategies for creating load test scenarios that reflect tendencies of the real world environment. To help us apply these strategies, it introduces best practices for organizing and executing load tests, and suggests how these best practices fit into a Web services application's development life-cycle.

It also demonstrates how to utilize performance monitors offered by WebSphere and the operating system, as well as how to analyze load testing results. The bulk of the discussion assumes that WSDL is used to describe the Web service's interface, and that SOAP and HTTP are used for the messaging and transport layers, respectively.

ATF - AJAX Toolkit Framework Project for Eclipse

IBM has proposed a new open-source project, ATF (AJAX Toolkit Framework) to the Eclipse Foundation that uses the AJAX style of development. ATF will provide extensible frameworks and exemplary tools for building IDEs (integrated development environments) for the many different AJAX runtime offerings, such as Dojo, Zimbra, etc. in the market, according to the project proposal.

• IBM Proposes Open-Source AJAX Project (Darryl K. Taft, eWeek.com, Jan 20, 2006.)

Today's Person: Michael Rappa - Professor E-Business

Michael Rappa is the Alan T. Dickson Distinguished University Professor of Technology Management and director of the Open Courseware Laboratory in the College of Management at North Carolina State University. He is the founder and co-director of the NC State E-Commerce educational initiative, and an associate faculty member in Computer Science and the Institute for Integrated Manufacturing Systems Engineering.
Dr. Rappa has been recognized on numerous occasions for his contributions to research, teaching and service to the academic community. He is a recipient of the North Carolina State University awards for Outstanding Extension Service, Graduate Teaching Excellence, and the Gertrude Cox Award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching and Learning with Technology; the Award for Innovative Excellence and a nominee for the Ernest L. Boyer International AwardMERLOT Award for Exemplary Online Learning from the Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Online Teaching; and a three-time winner of the IBM Faculty Award for his contributions to the study of e-business and the concept of open courseware.
His article on business models on the Web has very extensive and helpful introduction for this topic.

• Business Models on the Web

Restlet - A Java Framework for REST

Jerome Louvel, a developer based in Levallois-Perret, France, has established a project known as the Restlet project to create a REST framework on top of the Java Servlet API.

• Java Development Gets Web 2.0 Treatment

In his tutorial available from the official webpage, a bit of its server-side programming model is shown with a "Hello World!" example.

 // Creating a minimal handler returning "Hello World"
UniformInterface handler = new UniformInterface() {
   public void handle(UniformCall call) {
       call.setOutput(new StringRepresentation("Hello World!",
                        MediaTypes.TEXT_PLAIN));
   }
};

// Create the HTTP server and listen on port 8182
new JettyServer("My Web server", 8182, handler).start();

If you run this code and launch your server, you can open a Web browser and hit the http://localhost:8182. Actually, any URI will work, try also http://localhost:8182/test/tutorial. This handler is very primitive and only takes advantage of the pure REST part of the Restlet framework. Later in the tutorial, we can see how to take advantage of the Restlets in order to facilitate this processing.