can you validate my thoughts on a POC for webpagetest?

WebPageTest General Discussion
1

Hi to all, new member and thought it’d be worthwhile registering here to understand more about webpagetest.

Our aim is to build a customised view of the performance of our companies sites pages and possibly overlay that with information from Google Analytics etc with historical data to try and understand when and where changes have been made to our sites, which impact performance. We could also use that to alert site owners when we do bad things!

Having a brief read through the documentation it seems a private instance would be the ultimate aim, however I understand there’s a delay for setup so we’d prefer to do a proof of concept first using the Google API’s with the understanding of the limited requests we can make per day.

I’m an experienced dev in various languages so my first thought was to:

  1. create a web app
  2. run a test when a user request one
  3. poll the API till the test data is available
  4. store the results of those tests
  5. call out (from the webapp) to other datasources such as Google Analytics
  6. create custom views of the webpagetest data with those datasources

Realising webpagetest data would need to be run as long running batch processes I started thinking how I’d manage that async, polling, storing the results etc which is now making me question the time to deliver.

My preferred language nowadays is node.js and saw this API wrapper GitHub - WebPageTest/webpagetest-api: WebPageTest API wrapper for NodeJS (which can be run either from the console or from a node.js webapp) but having thought about it, I now think it’d make sense to run this as a console app and download the JSON results as a batch process and then consume them within the webapp.

Having read that back it seems obvious now but I’d be keen for any feedback as to how I can get this up and running as quickly as possible.

Thinking more about it, I’d probably not need an “app server” backend, if I just generate the data every day it could be copied to a static html webapp and just use JavaScript to call out to other datasources.

Thanks for any replies

2

How close does wpt-grunt get you to where you need to be (or at least give you a starting point to experiment)?

http://sideroad.github.io/sample-wpt-page/

3

andydavies, thanks for the reply. the node api gives me enough to get going.

I have to apologise for asking such a generic open ended question, after having played with the api my OP seems a bit stupid now :slight_smile:
However I’ve a number of other stupid questions now re the api responses and grading I’ll post in a separate thread.