Web technologies have progressed a great deal since the 90s. As we near the end of a new decade, we can look back on the development of useful, complex interactive web applications built atop any number of powerful technology stacks. However, as the complexity of applications increases to ever greater heights, many remain too brittle for their own good.

Eric and I have been thinking about the emerging challenges of web application development for quite some time. We believe that technology is outpacing our ability to properly use it. When we noticed the problem, we founded Testomatix.

Our goal is to help people alleviate the pain of testing the scalability of modern web applications. For many such applications, scalability can be a major source of problems for as long as they remain in active development. It doesn’t help matters that scalability issues don’t get the attention they deserve until actual damage is done.

In many cases, scalability issues come up not due to poor architecture, but from unanticipated bottlenecks. Introducing redundancies, caching data, and optimizing the queries will often make quite a difference, but the crucial bottleneck that will hold your site back can remain unapparent until after-the-fact. Load testing helps you know beforehand.

In a complicated application, tackling every aspect of design on paper is not always comforting–one can never discount human error. Using live traffic is similarly unreliable, since it won’t be predictable and it certainly won’t be forgiving once a problem occurs. In practice, the best approach is often to implement the most promising design candidate and see how it fares under heavy stress.

At Testomatix, we feel that load testing is important and frequently overlooked. Too often, it’s a time consuming process requiring expensive hardware, costly licensing, difficult scripting and other headaches. We started Testomatix to fix that problem. Scaling your application shouldn’t be so difficult. With easy and intuitive load testing, it won’t be.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Company, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.