Testing Frameworks for managing RIA

I was looking for some new stuff recently to be able to test an AJAX application accessible everywhere in the world that was showing some performance issues (at least users complained about it).

First major issue: no SLA was defined by the business. So how can we say if the application is slow or not?

Second major issue: We used extjs for building the Ajax based windows and the time to set-up the small javascript engine in the browser is killing the performance in ASPAC and sometimes in EMEA (servers are hosted in the USA). It is very difficult for a centralized team to check performance from different locations in regions and not on the intranet. So we were looking for a tool.

So that's what I found:
Desktop tool, very simple to use, created by Keynote:

• The most interesting one: Kite
  

Code based:

• Tellurium Automated Testing Framework
• WebDriver
  
• YUI Test
  

I also found a very good resource for testing any browser to test compatibility without installing on your laptop:

• Xenocode