As is well-documented on this site, I am a sucker for web development tools and am always on the lookout for new tools to make my job easier. You can probably understand, then, how excited I was to hear about a new AJAX performance tracing tool that makes debugging performance issues in the bane of my existence, Internet Explorer, easier.
Anyone who has done any web development at all knows that Internet Explorer is, by far, the most difficult browser to support. It simply doesn’t do well with complex web applications. In fact, I would say that around 30% of my development time on NPMap goes into trying to work out performance issues/bugs that are specific to Internet Explorer. And as web applications continue to increase in complexity, this task is only going to be become more and more difficult and time-consuming.
Luckily, Dynatrace recently released a tool called dynaTrace Ajax (free download) that should make debugging Internet Explorer performance much easier. It allows you to analyze your AJAX-driven web application in depth, including all network activity, JavaScript parsing and execution, etc. I’m not going to dive in deep here, because more intelligent people have already done the hard work (see below for links to detailed write-ups on dynaTrace Ajax), but I will say that if you are building complex, AJAX-driven web applications, I highly recommend this tool.