The Web Will Be So Fast
New initiatives like ☞ SPDY (Google) and ☞ Resource Packages are focusing on making the web much faster by addressing some of the problems of the ☞ HTTP protocol
SPDY is looking at addressing the following problems in HTTP:
- single request per connection
- exclusively client-initiated requests
- uncompressed request and response headers
- redundant headers
- optional data compression (the weight is on optional)
The second proposal mentioned, Resource packages is looking at a different issue present in browser: the access to the resources linked from web pages (to better understand what I mean you can check the cascading process of downloading these resources either by using Firebug, Safari developer tools, etc.)
While some might get tricked to think that the backend system performance is responsible for the user experience on web applications, there are a lot of optimization of the front-end tier that will increase the responsiveness of the webapp (check the recipes available in Y!Slow or Page Speed and described in detail in the Steve Souders books ☞ High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
And if you think that page speed is just nice to have, go and read James Hamilton’s post on ☞ The Cost of Latency.
