One of the touted advantages of cloud computing (especially Software as a Service) is that it removes the need to support older application versions. The IT department doesn’t have to worry about keeping end-user software in compliance with security patches or upgrading the business’ computers with commercial applications (such as Microsoft Office) or custom in-house [...]
web development
How to Check Your Web App for Security Vulnerabilities
by Robert Nemet | Comments
The day of release has arrived; everyone is happy. All reported bugs are fixed, all tests passed, and the servers are configured. The application starts its new life on the grid. Users enter their data, new content is being created. New features are added; new users are coming. Success! Then, one sunny day, all hell [...]
Which Platform is Next? All of Them…
by Shawn Wildermuth | Comments
The last few years seem rife with disruptive technologies: iPhone, Android, iPad, HTML5, and more. Lots more. For some organizations – not to mention the developers and testers who work in them – these disruptive technologies can be scary. You’ve spent months or years working with a particular platform and getting good at it. Now [...]
Take Your Desktop Application to the Web in 15 Minutes
by Cameron Laird | Comments
You have a crucial application that’s quietly done its job for years. Maybe it’s a game, played by tens of thousands of people around the world. Or it’s an oven control that ensures the crackers in one specific factory are perfectly crispy. Now someone wants—needs—that desktop (or tractor-top or command-center-top) application to run on the [...]
Making the Most of GPU Acceleration in Your Web Apps
by Andy Patrizio | Comments
In the past two years, the major web browsers have added support for the graphics processing unit (GPU) that’s a part of every PC. You might be aware that the GPU is there, but it rarely got used if you weren’t playing games. Quietly, the GPU is being put to work in non-entertainment ways. GPUs [...]
Frontiers in Virtualization for Quality Assurance
by Cameron Laird | Comments
Quality Assurance was the first domain where virtualization (as currently understood) moved from hype to reality. Testing laboratories began to manage desktop environments. Instead of inventorying them as physical assets — that machine over there is set up with WinNT SP3, and that’s a Vista system, and so on — desktop environments became software images [...]
6 Reasons Why HTML5 is More than Just Another Web Toolkit
by Cameron Laird | Comments
Quality Assurance’s greatest accomplishments arise when it does something most employees don’t even recognize as its job: eliminating difficulties before they exist, for instance. You probably can think of examples from your own experience, such as the time a QA professional identified and rejected a project “requirement” as untestable or problematic before it was accepted [...]
The Mobile Website Revival
Developers are in for a pleasant surprise in 2011. Jobs and freelance gigs galore are opening up as a result of a mobile website revival. “Mobile website development is a pretty empty room right now. Everyone’s over at the mobile app party,” says David Bodnick, founder and president of WebINTENSIVE Software. “But that’s likely to [...]
Rethinking Performance in a Post-Desktop, Browser-Based World
With JavaScript toolkits increasing their own performance by as much as 1000% per year, coupled with browser makers tripling their products’ performance in the same interval, Web sites everywhere should be accelerating by unfathomable factors. And that’s the problem: They’re not.
