Keynote KITE 2.0 Measures Web Site Performance, Applications

KITE in Action

At its most basic level, KITE enables users to test a particular URL using Keynote's Web site—the service accesses a given URL from the six points of presence I mentioned above—and provides a breakdown of all the elements on the specified page and how much network time and browser rendering time it took to load those elements.

For scripted site interaction, the KITE desktop application comes into play. The KITE client enables users to create two types of script, those that involve scripting of a real Web browser, called TxP scripts, and those that involve scripting of an emulated browser, called ApP scripts. The ApP scripts incur fewer costs when run on Keynote's remote points of presence (beyond the six free points), but the TxP scripts are required to test rich, asynchronous Web applications.

For the KITE user interface, Keynote adopted the look of the Microsoft Ribbon UI that debuted in Office 2007. Functionally, however, KITE's ribbon implementation differs from that in Office in its lack of context sensitivity. Rather, the ribbon shifted between its Script, Edit, Performance, View and Options modes at my command. One nice UI touch was the option KITE offered of displaying Advanced, Default or Simple layouts, which I found helpful as I got up to speed on the application.

I found it very easy to script operations with basic Web applications, such as the Mediawiki wiki server—the process involved hitting the prominent red record button in the upper left corner of the KITE UI, stepping through the site operations I wished while in a standard-looking browser Window and hitting a stop button when I was finished.

From there, I could hit a play button on KITE's ribbon, and the script would duly step through my recorded operations and offer up a performance report similar to the one provided by Keynote's Web-based single URL testing option. Unlike that Web-based test, the scripts I ran from the KITE client ran through my local network, which allowed me to compare performance between, for instance, our production LAN and the wireless network we maintain in our lab.

Scripting AJAX-based Web applications was more complicated and required some script tweaking to compensate for the asynchronous operations of these applications. In a basic Web application such as Mediawiki, individual operations are broken up into new page loads, and KITE marks the completion of these operations through messages from the browser that indicate a page has finished loading.

In an AJAX application, network and browser operations occur asynchronously, so it's necessary to give KITE other markers to indicate that an operation has finished, such as a short period of network inactivity. It's also possible to insert additional completion conditions to KITE scripts, such as waiting for a particular bit of text to be loaded on a page before moving ahead with the script.

To run one of my scripts from Keynote's remote network, I navigated to the same site from which I could test a single URL, chose the script option and uploaded my KITE script from my local system. Keynote's site then ran my script from its six locations and provided performance breakdowns, by location, for each operation in my script. ´

eWEEK Labs Executive Editor Jason Brooks can be reached at jbrooks@eweek.com.