optimise for faster navigation

According to what Nielsen says, the average size of web sites have gone up making them fatter and fatter in the last few years. On the other hand, people’s response times have come down to 2.3 seconds per page.

Still he feels that half of the world doesn’t have faster broadband access and hence web sites need to be slimmer, simpler and easier to browse through, and such websites will get more attention than fatter but slower websites. We need to achieve a response time of 1.0 seconds for an optimal user experience.

As we all know, once the inter web was filled with web sites containing big images which rather distracted us. It has moved to a web2.0 era and been replaced with widgets. This hasn’t improved things anyway, still the web sites are slower and distractive a lot. The only way to attain the ultimate interactivity is to have sites which load up faster and are more easier to navigate around. If the user has to search on how to reach the next page or the previous, especially in his first encounter, he rarely returns back to the site again.

Promising Projects - Brainwave and Returnable

In the past two days, I happen to see two mails regarding two new projects. Though both did not attract the best of my interests that I jump out and dig my hands into it. Rather I felt I can write about them. Here I go with a brief introduction to both of them.

Brainwave

Brainwave is said to be a Software Development Kit which comes along with a very different database engine, a rich API widgets library and a deployment server. I came to know through a mail sent to Bangypy mailing list. Though the question whether this product is Open Source is yet to be answered, there is an interesting component in this product which is told as a pending-patent technology.

The main components of this SDK are

• Iris, the Application server
• Aphrodite, the User Interface
• Poseidon, the Database
• Cerberus, the Security component

Iris is the application server (or the deployment server) which is actually built over the very popular CherryPy Python-based web server. Aphrodite is a XSLT based standard templating system, which renders the templates as HTML 4.0 Transitional compliant code for IE5+ and FF1.0+ (but it is said for Windows and Mac, urgh!).

Poisedon is said to be the core of Brainwave, being the database system with a difference. It is an non relational DBMS with no requirement of schema. Instead of tables and columns, data is stored as ‘memes’ and ‘links’ which are types of neurons. While memes are fundamental units of data, links are relationships between neurons. Links have a subject (origin), an object (target) and a verb (modifier). Thus data is stores as neurons linked to one another by the links defined by the verbs. This model imposes no constrain on the type of data that can be handled. This is a very new idea which is yet to hit the masses.

Cerberus is the security manager for Poisedon and it acts based on capabilities and policies.

Brainwave is a promising product indeed, but until the question of FOSS gets answered let me wait to dig my hands into it.

Returnable

Returnable serves as an open platform architectural guide to advance the URL as a DSL for specifying 3 traits - the content, its delivery and its behavior on the web through the use of Returnable elements embedded within the web pages.

This is not a big endeavor such as Brainwave, but rather a personal project from Bhasker Kode (who had mailed the ilugc mailing list about this). It involves a bit of JS, PHP, url rewrtie, regext and CSS. This is just a way to create events using HTML as the API, provided that the initial script was added to the DOM.

He claims it to be a great utility for bloggers, for an easy way to create tool-tips. The following are some links associated with this project.

• Official Returnable Web site
• Sourceforge Project

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