Crescendo's Web Application Performance Blog

iPhones or Android - whichever smart phone wins, one thing is sure. By the end of 2010, there will be more users accessing applications from mobile browsers than today. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will have handsets capable of rich mobile commerce. (See Gartner's Top Ten Strategic Technologies for 2010.) That's a really big market.

What does this mean for your application? Time to optimize for mobile.

Obviously, you should look at optimizing application functions and web design for delivery to mobile handsets - stripping out flash and reducing text, for example.

But once you've worked around design, performance is a key factor. The data networks these phones use aren't as fast as users expect. Performance is probably the #1 frustration for mobile users accessing web applications.

Data compression is essential - by sending less data to the client, you're actually accelerating the page display for the end user, making your application faster.

Every web server has a compression feature, but in most cases it's running from the same software stack as the rest of the server. Compressing data consumes processing resources that could be used for other things.

By consolidating data compression in a web-facing application delivery controller like AppBeat DC, you benefit in multiple ways:

• You free resources on web servers, essentially increasing the capacity of your existing infrastructure
  

• You benefit from high-performance, low-latency compression using specialized hardware that does not steal cycles from application performance.
  

So get ready for mobile, the smart phone users are already out there trying to use your site or web application, and they're getting more numerous.