View-Centric Performance Optimization for Database-Backed Web Applications

Abstract

Web developers face the stringent task of designing informative web pages while keeping the page-load time low. This task has become increasingly challenging as most web contents are now generated by processing ever-growing amount of user data stored in back-end databases. It is difficult for developers to understand the cost of generating every web-page element, not to mention explore and pick the web design with the best trade-off between performance and functionality. In this paper, we present Panorama, a view-centric and database-aware development environment for web developers. Using database-aware program analysis and novel IDE design, Panorama provides developers with intuitive information about the cost and the performance-enhancing opportunities behind every HTML element, as well as suggesting various global code refactorings that enable developers to easily explore a wide spectrum of performance and functionality trade-offs.