An interesting article has been published on www.devx.com by Ty Anderson, a consultant at Cogent Company. Check it out - he does a great job of pointing out how application developers can take advantage of the network (and specifically - iRules and iControl) when writing apps. Here's a snippet...

"The reality is developers can build better, more effective applications by utilizing Application Delivery Controller (ADC). These devices are deployed in your network and track all network traffic. This includes in-coming, out-going, and internal traffic. Once installed and configured, these devices know everything that occurs in your network. This means they also know everything about the information sent and received by your applications."

For more, go here: http://www.devx.com/vstudioextensibility/Article/35158