Improving Web 2.0 Applications
Dr. Dobbs Journal this morning has an article on an analytical proxy engine developed by the boffins over at Microsoft that allows developers a way to instrument their web 2.0 applications to make sure they are safe and that they work the way they were intended to work.
“The goal of the Ajax View project,” he says, “is to improve the visibility that Web-application developers have into how their applications are running inside end user’s browsers out in the real world. Having detailed, code-level monitoring can help developers discover, understand, and fix the bugs that are affecting real users. ” Source: Dr. Dobbs Journal
Going through the article the process breaks down into three steps, instrumentation, observation, and analysis of the data that the programmer is getting. Hopefully there are a number of expected behaviors in the web 2.0 code set. This system also has dual uses in that what the programmer is doing is what the security department should be doing, which is what the hacker is doing.
Since Mozilla and Internet Explorer both have inbuilt proxy systems to do this same kind of testing and functionality, the whole stimulus response cycle of working out what is working and what is not working or provides leverage for the bad person who is trying to break your application.
The cool part about this project is that it looks like it can be automated and break point where the application starts behaving in ways that the developer didn’t expect. This will make a great Quality Assurance tool, security tool, and will end up being in the hands of clever hackers as well. So might as well test the applications out before others do that kind of work for you.
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