Analysis and Testing of Ajax-based Single-page Web Applications

User Interactivity
User-perceived Latency
Network Performance
Rest-based Classic Web – – – + + + + – +− –
Client-centric Ajax + + – + –
ARPC Ajax + + + + – –
Push-based Ajax + + – – + +
Spiar-based Ajax + + + + +− + – + + +
Simplicity
Scalability
Portability
Visibility
Table 2.3 AJAX configurations and properties.
Data Coherence
Reliability
Adaptability
main variations. Using Spiar as a reference point, commonalities and divergences
can be identified.
Table 2.3 shows a number of Ajax configurations along with the induced
architectural properties. The first entry is the Rest-based classic Web configuration.
While simple and scalable in design, it has, a very low degree of
responsiveness, high user-perceived latency, and there is a huge amount of
redundant data transferred over the network.
The second configuration is the Client-centric Ajax. Most Ajax frameworks
started by focusing on the client-side features. Frameworks such as Dojo,
Ext, 13 and jQuery 14 all provide rich UI widgets on the client, facilitating a
client-centric style of interaction in which most of the functionality is offloaded
to the browser. Generally, an interaction between components that
share the same location is considered to have a negligible cost when compared
to interaction that is carried out through a network (Carzaniga et al., 1997).
This variant provides a high degree of user interactivity and very low userperceived
latency. There is, however, no support for adaptability as all the
code is off-loaded to the client and that makes this variant static in terms of
code changes from the server.
Frameworks such as GWT, DWR, 15 and JSON-RPC-Java 16 support the
Asynchronous Remote Procedure Call (ARPC) style of interaction. In this configuration,
all the presentational and functional code is off-loaded to the browser
and the server is only asynchronously contacted in case of a change in terms
of raw textual data. Low user-perceived latency, high user interactivity and
reduced server round-trips are the characteristics of this configuration. Even
though the textual data can be dynamically requested from the server, there
is a limited degree of adaptability for the presentational and functional code.
The fourth configuration is a pure push-based interaction in which the
state changes are streamed to the client (by keeping a connection alive), with-
13 http://extjs.com
14 http://jquery.com
15 http://getahead.org/dwr
16 http://oss.metaparadigm.com/jsonrpc/
Chapter 2. A Component- and Push-based Architectural Style for Ajax 47