Ben Summers, Technical Director at ONEIS, a U.K-based
information management platform provider, points out
that "habits learned when writing web applications for
14.4kbps dial-up telephone modems come in rather handy
when dealing with modern day mobile connections. When
you only had couple of Kbytes per second, and latencies
of a few hundred milliseconds, you were very careful to
minimize the size of the pages you sent, and just as
importantly, minimize the amount of back and forth with
the server."
With today's mobile connections, says Summers, "the
latency is much worse than using a telephone modem
connection, and that's compounded by error rates in
congested areas like city centers. The fast 'broadband'
headline speeds are pretty irrelevant to web applications.
It's the latency which determines how fast the response
time will feel, and tricks learned when phone modems
ruled the world come in awfully handy. As a bonus, when
someone uses your app on a fixed connection, it'll feel
as fast as desktop software!"
The author put out a request for contributions, and somehow it ended up in my inbox. I thought, "why not?". I just proposed a topic, and when the offer was accepted, wrote a short bit of text.
I'm curious as to the effect it will have, if any. So far it's resulted in two hits to our web site, neither of which explored any further than the home page.
