I have been asked to be a judge on a new web performance contest that is being run by Keynote Systems.  Over the last two plus years I have been building tools that make optimizing web applications as simple as a button click.  Others in the web performance community have been educating or writing their own tools …but… there are still plenty of sites out in the wild that need help.  Working with Keynote for the past couple months I have seen some pretty well know sites that need a lot of help. This is where the contest comes in.

The Contest:

“The competition is open to anyone who wants to make tired, poor, slow Web applications faster and more responsive. Entrants simply record the Web site path or transaction that they want to improve using KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment) which can be downloaded for free from http://kite.keynote.com/download-center.php. “

Read more about contest here. Read more…

Seeing the feature list for the latest version of IE (8), I was excited to download it and get started exploring one feature in particular – that was the new XDomainRequest object. The XDomainRequest object gives developers the ability to access resources outside of the original application’s host domain (www.rockstarpps.com for my blog).  This limitation was imposed to eliminate sending sensitive data to bad people for nefarious reasons.  Even with this restriction, developers have been able hack around the browser limitation get Cross Domain (aka cross-site) functionality.

Cross-Domain (aka Cross-Origin, Cross-site) requests aren’t new to the Web world they have been available in Flash for some time.  As a supporter of the Open Web, I try to do most of my application development in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Every now and then I get the urge to build a new application to prototype a thought or fill a singular niche (That’s one that I will most likely find interesting or useful).

That’s how the Snipper application came about. When I was done with the basic functionality, I decided to build a web application that did essentially what the eclipse plugin does.

• Submit Content to S3
• Update Status on Twitter
• Submit Content to S3

Read more…

Since October I have immersed myself in understanding what Clouds and Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) can do for Web Application developers. Many of the people I know have deployed or are looking to applications on a Cloud infrastructure this year.  Just yesterday, I was talking to a company that I know and they are moving from a hosted ruby service to Azamon looking to make scaling out their service simpler.

The area that is of the biggest interest to me personally is, “how does using a Cloud affect Website optimization?” (That’s the focus of rockstarapps.com tools.) Starting out I was assumed that using Cloud infrastructure or a CDN was only for sites like ESPN.com or CNN.com. How could I, one person and no budget be able to leverage these technologies? Taking this question and breaking it down into several more manageable questions, I try to provide you with the information needed to get started using it in your own projects.

• Isn’t using a CDN going to be expensive?
• How easy will it be to get up to speed and use the technology effectively?
• How can using a CDN like CloudFront improve a sites performance?

Read more…

Over the last few months I have been working on getting the latest version of jsLex coded, packaged and tested.  A few weeks ago, I wrote up my thoughts on the new release 2009 will be a Rockstar year. If you want to check out the features in the new version go to the products section of the site.

Product releases are more than just the bits and JAR files, you need to update documentation and Web pages to reflect the new stuff. If you can’t find it on Google does it really exist? In the past I had been using three separate methods.

• Static HTML homepage
• Wordpress
• A wiki

Going forward, I felt this was too many solutions and none of them appropriate to manage a 50 page website where I will be updating it in real time.  So… in order to move the site forward I needed to find a CMS system.  The thought of this gave me the shivers; but it needed to be done.

Read more…

I just read on news.ycombinator.com via Eric.Weblog via Z trek that the Programming Magazine Dr. Dobbs will no longer be publishing it’s normal monthly rag.  Click for Dr. Dobbs take.  That really stinks.  Even though I don’t read it regularly any more.  When I started my first full-time job back in 1995, I read Dr. Dobbs and MSJ (Microsoft System Journal) every month.

Back then both of those magazine were sold at newsstands and bookstores, so every month I would go with my girlfriend now wife to Borders and buy the latest copy of each magazine.  My wife has way different tastes then me so she got… actually not sure she got, I was busy reading my magazines. In the early days of my career, I always looked to the publication to learn new programming technique, and spark new ideas. Dr Dobbs was throughout the time I read the magazine high quality and packed with a variety of programming languages and implementation ideas.  Variety, I felt was one of its greatest attributes.  It never seemed to focus in one area but rather gave an introduction to many different things.  This was completely opposite to MSJ which focused for obvious reasons on Microsoft (This was a great magazine as well). Read more…

Thanks to everyone!

One of my apdictions is Google Analytics and over the last several days I have noticed an up tick in amount of traffic the jsLex tool has been getting. This is a result of two recent posts;

1. Kevin Hackman of Aptana linked to the jsLex tool in a news article on Aptana’s website.
2. Forum post on the ExtJS website, click here to see post.

Thanks to the people that have used jsLex to this point and to those who link to and talk about the tool a double thanks. There is no better way to get the word out then to have people talk about the tool as satisfied user.

The other thing that I noticed in Google Analytics: there are quite a few searches for “jsLex ant”. I am taking this to mean that people want to use the jsLex concatenation and compression tools via ant. To those who are searching for this, is this a correct assumption? If so, I can whip this up for you to use Read more…