KITE 2.0 (Keynote Internet Testing Environment) from Keynote Systems, the supplier of on-demand mobile and Internet test and measurement products, provides its users with some new options for testing the performance of a Web application from their desktops.

KITE enables developers, QA testers, and performance analysts to measure the end-user experience of Web 2.0 applications that may include AJAX and asynchronously downloaded content. Transaction scripts can be run in real time from multiple cities, exploiting Keynote's global test and measurement network.

The tool can be used by teams involved in the application lifecycle to establish performance benchmarks for pre- and post-application deployment, and to resolve performance problems as they arise.

KITE 2.0, a free download, comes with the ability to receive free instance performance data from five cities: San Francisco, New York, London, Frankfurt, and Hong Kong. KITE users can upload scripts to more than 70 metropolitan areas worldwide to gather performance data.

"In the early days of the Web, very little interaction was happening between the browser and the Web server behind it. Most of the Web applications consisted of HTML pages," says Rajeev Kutty, product manager with Keynote Systems. "Now, in the transition to the Web 2.0 world, the applications are more dynamic and use scripting languages so that more work is being done by the browser. The applications on the browser side have grown in complexity."

Web operations staff can only do so much to improve performance. Application performance is really determined during development. "So with KITE 2.0, we are taking an application primarily developed for Web operations staff, and made it into a fundamental performance measurement tool for developers and the QA world as well," says Kutty. "We have added a lot of new features to make them more aware of how to improve the performance of the Web application."

The top technical features of KITE 2.0 are: performance analysis for multi-page transactions; native Internet Explorer integration for analysis of AJAX, Flash and JavaScript; test performance from the desktop, the last mile and the Internet cloud; JavaScript programmability for scripting actions based on the Document Object Model (DOM); and the ability to record Web application test scripts, play them back in "burst mode," and share scripts across groups.

The Keynote business model for KITE calls for money to be made on the Web operations side when scripts get deployed and require continuous monitoring. Kutty says that pricing for the paid service can start at $100/month for a 15-minute monitoring cycle in 10 U.S. cities. Many customers spend on the order of $5,000 a year on such services from Keynote, he adds.

For more information, go to: www.keynote.com