Start-up’s appliance accelerates ASP.Net apps

An appliance that accelerates dynamic Web applications built with the Microsoft ASP.Net framework is being announced today by Canadian start-up Strangeloop Networks.

Strangeloop’s AppScaler appliance appears to be the first product to specifically target speed problems in applications based on ASP.Net, says Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala.

“When I first talked to them, I thought ‘why do we need another one of these guys?’” Kerravala says. But, “they seem to have found a little niche in the market that no one else solves.”

AppScaler works by eliminating code that doesn’t need to be sent across a network to a user’s browser, says Joshua Bixby, co-founder and senior vice president of product management for Strangeloop, in Vancouver, B.C.

Developers place this extra code in Web applications because it helps them quickly and easily develop dynamic programs, Bixby says. This creates a trade-off in performance the AppScaler solves by taking out the excess code in a way that improves performance without changing the visual content of the Web page, he says.

“Because we understand ASP.Net, we understand what we can leave in, what we can take out, how we can change it,” he says. “The page you get is half the size, but your experience [as a user] is not affected at all.”

Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (AJAX)-based applications such as ones built with ASP.Net are supposed to quickly generate new content without a user reloading a Web page, similar to a desktop application.

But many of these sites suffer performance problems, and Strangeloop executives believe existing solutions are inadequate.

“As applications become more dynamic, more interactive and more personalized, they get slower and slower,” Bixby says. “The network person has no tools available to them today to make this application go faster. The only thing they can do is tell the developers to optimize their code, to throw more resources at developers.”

AppScaler sits in front of a customer’s Web servers, and behind the load balancer and other network gear. “It requires no change to any of those things,” Bixby says. “You write no code, you don’t change any rules, you just plop it in and it works. It’s totally transparent to the network.”