South Pacific Web Mapping

I have worked on this one lately:

click here for Australian / New Zealand Versions.

and starting to really like SharePoint 2007 (SP2 onwards), excellent .NET application container that allows you to define your cache policies and expiry periods(BLOB, Output and Object Caching) and fine tune expiry periods.

a Nice feature is when you really need to go spatial (GIS queries and mapping UI) you can use native SQL Server as your data store and still have content and media resources caching managed by IIS/Load-balancer.

When dealing with Australian and New Zealand mash-ups I believe the best way is maintaining a data store with well defined expiry periods (e.g. traffic vs. weather vs. external providers cached content) and later distributing its static elements into the cloud.

I have been experimenting with Amazons EC2 services for a real estate related research project (heat mapping commercial property stats) and Amazon has excellent .NET hooks allowing you to push content out to the cloud and later reference it within .net applications (or any other content blocks), this methods significantly reduce bandwidth costs/server maintenance overhead and improves response and serving time by reducing latency.

The architecture illustrated below will provide a SharePoint managed CDN for $0.15 USD per GB of traffic (based on Amazon’s current data transfer price plan):

This page has been constructed out of content distributed from three different continents, so the bottom line is:

“use out of the box content management tools and distribute its product using cloud services”.

Had an interesting biz tour in Seoul last month, pretty amazing growth in terms of GDP and Internet usage, once there LG and Samsung seems to be just the tip of the iceberg when looking into the local devices, service providers and wireless data infrastructure.

web mapping capabilities and internet UI (animation and front-end stuff) still has lots of potential giving the fact that the local script (Hangul) is all left to right with a nice reasonable 24 character set.. and could run Joomla almost out of the box!!

I have done a few speed/load tests from downtown Seoul, lots of router hops on a really good link, latency to NZ/AU was pretty big though..

Some of my sites are hosted in Kansas City,MO which is a common location for many large data centers in the US,  Kansas is a popular place for building data centers because it provides equal network latency for both east and west cost clients due to its central location (latency depends on the length of the actual link, i.e. how long is the transmitting optical fiber cable).

Kansas City was initially built because of the strategic confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers that provided good steam ship transport through the Mississippi-Missouri river.

Kansas City 1869

Being a large population center on the river it had one of the first major railroad bridges across the Missouri  which made the city a major south to north east to west railroads hub

Once the optical fiber network infrastructure used by the core of today’s Internet was build, the public land of the railroad grid has been utilised for laying out the cables making it the new communication highway, Kansas once again became a major network/data center hub (all of this because the same bridge on the same old river..)

(source: colocationmontreal.com).

I am currently running most of my response time and web latency tests from Dallas and Kansas which provides extremely reliable results giving the infrastructure and location of those data centers.

The Google GMail Team came up with this one for solving latency issues on mobile based apps:

http://ajaxian.com/archives/gmail-mobile-latency

This one speeds the loading of a mobile web page + full parsing of  the interaction layer(Javascript) from 2600ms to 240ms (10 faster!!) on the same script block size(200KB)!!

Worth trying when customising web apps for moblies (which has good 3G bandwidth but really bad  latency due to the transport over microwave).

I am currently within the last stage of defining my research thesis in computer science, this research will address methods for delivering GeoWeb applications while minimising the effect of network latency on user experience.

This proposal is a result of practical experience in designing and developing web applications for the New Zealand and Australian Internet market for the last 7 years, the research aims to provide scientific evidence and methodologies for minimising the effect of network latency on the load time of web content (see my post on this subject here).

With the latest advances in response/load-time monitoring and measurements services, it is now possible to collect statistics of monitoring agents across the globe and identify network trends towards optimising web delivery according to the originating content requirements.

A typical web based map mash-up could potentially include HTTP requests from several different sources (content providers, storage distributors etc.) spanning across several continents, selecting the optimal resources during the initial load of the page (the DOM Ready browser phase) will be the primary factor for efficiently serving web content.

Within my practical professional experience I have been maintaining and monitoring over 110 servers while optimising the actual web applications running on top of those servers for delivering rich graphic content. This optimisation included usage of CDN providers, requests source tracking and progressive download techniques while monitoring the results from numerous locations around the globe.

A notable network monitoring solution that I have been using within my research since 2006 is Pingdom, which I believe is the only response time monitoring solution that exposes an API. This feature enables querying its worldwide monitoring agents counters for generating real-time, applications specific, global response time reports and statistics.

In February 1882 the Dunedin sailed out of Port Chalmers loaded with New Zealand dairy products targeting London’s markets while overcoming the distance limitations and utilising the latest cooling technologies, becoming the first commercial refrigeration ship ever.

I believe that with the massive move towards SaaS technologies powered by the growing IT Outsourcing/Cloud Computing trend, New Zealand’s prime location and unique IP routing link could play a significant role in researching ways for overcoming network limitations for physically distributed services.

On the arrival of the Dunedin in London 98 days laterThe Times commented: “Today we have to record such a triumph over physical difficulties, as would have been incredible, even unimaginable, a very few days ago…” which sounds very relevant considering the development of the internet today.