A new theme at this year's Interop New York conference a couple weeks back was Web 2.0 applications and tools such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and AJAX. The conference highlighted how the technologies can help businesses be more productive by implementing these types of applications that enable more application logic to reside on the client and less to live on the server alone.

For instance, applications built with AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, can keep content up-to-date by refreshing only the parts of a screen that have changed by performing many tasks previously done on a server with the client PC and Web browser. This enables users to update information without depending on data being sent or received from a server.

Yet that advancement in application logic being processed on client browsers could still result in more data traversing between client and servers - which could represent a potential nightmare to network managers.

Vendors such as Crescendo Networks used Interop to warn network managers that they need to take into account the potential increase in traffic to avoid performance slow downs. Factors such as more TCP connections between servers and clients, more HTTP transactions, larger first page loads and higher bandwidth requirements can cause these new productivity driven applications to stall traffic on the network.

Application front-end (AFE) vendors such Crescendo, F5 Networks and Citrix's NetScaler could help. AFE technologies speed application delivery by reducing back-end processing bottlenecks and offloading TCP/IP connection setup and tear-down from servers, for instance.

For its part, Crescendo announced at Interop it would be partnering with Web 2.0 and "Rich Internet Application" vendors such as BackBase to proactively optimize this traffic on enterprise nets. The company distributed a white paper at the show.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.