Apple Announces iPhone Developer News RSS Feed

http://www.iphonealley.com/current/apple-announces-iphone-developer-news-rss-feed

Faster apps for a faster web: introducing Speed Tracer

Do you ever wonder what's going on inside the browser when a webpage doesn't load or respond as quickly as it should? Many developers do, especially when trying to build powerful web applications for their users.

But up until now, it's been difficult for developers to identify problems in a slow-to-respond application. So, tonight at Google Campfire One, we're happy to announce that we're adding a new tool to Google Web Toolkit called Speed Tracer.

Speed Tracer is a Google Chrome extension that enables developers to identify performance problems in their web apps using a "Sluggishness Graph," in combination with many other metrics. In the spirit of clean, simple design, developers need only look at the Y-Axis of their application's Sluggishness Graph to see how they're doing:

• If the y-axis is close to zero, then the app is fast
• If the y-axis registers around 100%, then the app is, well, sluggish

And in either case, Speed Tracer provides lots of additional data to help diagnose any particular performance issue.

More @ http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/faster-apps-for-faster-web-introducing.html

10 Useful Website Management and Testing Tools

LoadStorm

This web based load testing tool to check web performance of your website. You can create as many test plans, scenarios, and steps as you need. Tests can be built using the tool in such a way as to simulate a large number of different users with unique logins and different tasks.

SiteAnalysis

It also an important tool to test and validate critical website components. You can easily test and validate internal and external links, domain names, DNS servers and SSL certificates. It can be easily run as per your preference that can be as often as every hour, or as infrequent as once a week. This is best suited for dynamic sites requiring frequent link checking.

Avalanche

Another load testing tool specially designed to stress-test security, network, and Web application infrastructures by generating large quantities of user and network traffic. It emulates multiple Web browsers, supports Web Services testing Supports HTTP 1.0/1.1, SSL, FTP, RTSP/ RTP, MS Win Media, SMTP, POP3, DNS, Telnet, and Video on Demand over Multicast protocols.

VisualVM

This is a free tool to examine and troubleshoot Java applications. It runs seamlessly on Sun JDK 6 and also efficient in monitoring applications on JDK 1.4 and higher. Its automatically detects and lists locally and remotely running Java applications while monitoring application performance and memory consumption. It saves application configuration and runtime environment together with all taken thread dumps, heap dumps and profiler snapshots.

HTML Validator

It is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar while browsing. It allows you to validate the HTML sent by the server or the HTML in the memory (after Ajax execution). You can easily see Error details on the HTML source of the page for correction.

Fortify 360

This tool ensures security of your website along with vulnerability detection. It features integrate static source code analysis, dynamic runtime analysis, and real-time monitoring to identify and accurately prioritize the greatest number of critical security vulnerabilities. Its Program Trace Analyzer (PTA) that finds vulnerabilities that become visible only when an application is running and integrates into a QA test to find vulnerabilities while a functional test is being conducted on an application.

XenoCode Browser Sandbox

Another important testing before launching a website is Browser testing. This tool offers a series of virtual applications that can run all popular browsers simultaneously. It does not even require the installation of software.

W3C HTML Validation Service

This validator checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. If you wish to validate specific content such as RSS/Atom feeds or CSS stylesheets, MobileOK content, or to find broken links, there are other validators and tools available.

Google’s Website Optimizer

It is another testing service from Google where you can test the content and pages you want. Here you can test headlines, images, or text using our easy web-based system. The testing done through this service helps in determining impacts on conversions, user actions, traffic, or other goals.

DeviceAnywhere

This is a mobile handset testing platform allows development, deployment, and testing of content/apps on more than 2000 real handset devices in live global networks around the world using just the Internet. The mobile handset bank includes devices stationed in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Japan etc.

We hope these tools will help you in launching and maintaining user-friendly and error free website. Please share with us your suggestions and feedback as always.

From http://blog.limeexchange.com/2009/12/03/10-useful-website-management-and-testing-tools/