Tag: Web Development

API Performance Testing, Part 2

Using JProfiler to Analyze Performance I just completed a long analysis of our V2 API using JProfiler for API performance testing and want to spend some time — ok, the lion’s share of this post — discussing what we learned from this analysis. JVM profiling by and large, aims to identify long-running or redundant method invocations. […]

Client-side Image Composition with HTML5

As Constant Contact produces more and more video content, we’ve started to run into some unlikely bottlenecks in the video creation process. One of the big ones turns out to be the creation of preview thumbnails, which requires compositing a play button over a frame of video and saving out the resulting image. This simple, […]

Concurrency Insights from Web Server Technologies

As we explore the scaling of Web applications in many dimensions (number of users, size of data, UI functionality, and more), there are various challenges, many subtle and surprising.  Some of the thorniest arise from the high latency of communications over the Internet, which generally leads to designs supporting greater concurrency. Hardware advances have helped: […]

Sinatra for Rapid Prototyping

Recently, I’ve been working on a project that is mostly front-end work, but also communicates with some back-end web services.  I needed something to quickly respond to some basic GET requests at various endpoints and return either HTML fragments or JSON.  I’m not much of a big Ruby or Rails programer (although I do admire […]

Rails vs Django: A Developer’s Comparison

As you might know from reading some of my previous blog posts, I’ve been working with Python and Django pretty extensively over the last year, mainly for rapid prototyping and developing relatively simple web applications (including a Facebook App). During Cool Stuff Week I decided to try using Ruby on Rails (RoR) as the base […]