Best of this Week Summary 22 - 28 July 2007

• Interesting conclusion made in a technical report from the Delft University of Technology regarding the use of push vs pull techniques in AJAX applications for web-based realtime notifications. They concluded that:
  
  
  "In this paper we have compared pull and push solutions for achieving web-based real time event notification. The contributions of this paper include the experimental design, a reusable implementation of a sample application in push and pull style as well as a measurement framework, and the experimental results.
  Our experiment shows that if we want high data coherence and high network performance, we should choose the push approach. However, push brings some scalability issues; the server application CPU usage is 7 times higher as in pull. According to our results, the server starts to saturate at 350-500 users. For larger number of users, load balancing and server clustering techniques are unavoidable."
  
  
• Yahoo released this very cool extension to Firebug (the standard tool for webdevelopers) named YSlow. Here's a good introduction with screenshots and what it can do. Here's an example of it analyzing this blog (click on it for the large version):
  
  


• On the funny side: a list of commonly used development methodologies that are "broken" to say the least :-)