Application Delivery Infrastructure

Tony Waltham writes about a new concept Application Delivery Infrastructure in Bangkok Post (Paraphrased):

Web Applications often tend to replicate the features found in client-server applications, which make them consume more resources. This brings a need to optimize these applications. Web applications also demand high security.

A new intelligent Networking Layer called Application Delivery Infrastructure has emerged to address these needs.

This is a new concept and it aims to

• Understand the users


• Understand the application and content


• Apply creative approach to Bandwidth management, caching and compression while minimising the sluggishness of protocols that were originally designed for LAN

From a simple set of Web objects (like links, buttons), web applications have become complicated CRM or Inventory Management applications and people increasingly find it difficult to use them. The quest for more functionality has made these applications very slow.

Different approaches to address this problem:

• F5 Network's Intelligent Browser Referencing: Eliminates the need for the browser to download repetitive or duplicate data, by increasing the number of connections. For example, when you visit a website with 50 objects, browsers like IE or Firefox usually have to make 25 round trips to get the data. Whereas, F5's Technology allows applications to open up more than just two connections at the same time.


• Avoiding downloading unnecessary data. For instance, just downloading pages of a PDF rather than entire document.


• Instead of a Web Server saying to the browser, 'Hey! to get the more current data, check back to me in 10 seconds', it can say, 'I can tell you what you never have to check back with me on, and I can tell you what you have to check back with me on x seconds later.'

The story also references other players in this area: Juniper Networks and Citrix Systems.