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…

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.

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Web performance has been a topic I have been working on for quite some time now. While building Nexaweb’s Ajax library we ran into and solved many challenges that developers will face while developing their own Ajax applications. Most of my effort has been around JavaScript performance and Ajax’s impact on a websites performance.
Ajax’s Impact on site performance

• Increased Number of Requests
• Increased Download Size
• Increased JavaScript Code

Upcoming Webinar

On Thursday at 2:00pm myself and Ryan Breen from Gomez and Ajax Performance.com will be giving a free 2 hour webinar covering all things performance. Usually, I do this webinar by myself, so I am excited to get another person on board to give their perspective on Website performance. Ryan will be talking about:

• Survey tools available for performance analysis
• Establish and follow a site optimization workflow
• Explore real world examples of how to improve the end user experience

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Go to Webex.com and sign up, its free, you can ask questions and we will be handing out information on how you can optimize the performance of your Website / Web application.

Sign up for the Webinar now!

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jsLex Motivation

I started jsLex over a year ago and have been adding features and fixing bugs for all those that asked. The project initially started out as a way to find out what was taking up all the size in my JavaScript files. That’s where the name came from, JavaScript Lexiconical Analyzer or jsLex for short. Even though that feature is still in there and very useful, the project has continued to evolve. Next, I added the JavaScript metricing that makes it possible to find performance bottlenecks with large Ajax application using any web browser.

Now, this version of the project has taken the project to the next level. Over the last year I have talked at many conferences about ways to optimize Ajax applications; reduce the number of requests and reduce the size of the requests. Many others out there have done even more to educate people on ways to do this using a variety of techniques. The issue with using many of the techniques, they are almost always command line driven. I’m a IDE user, so things not integrated into Eclipse are a pain in the ass. Read more…

On March 11th, 2008, I gave e-conference presentation on dealing with large data in an Ajax application. The presentation can be seen by clicking here.

It can be challenging to get your Ajax application to meet your data requirements.

The presentation walks through an explanation of which is faster to use XML vs. JSON.

Included in the presentation was several sample applications that illustrate ways to page data using an Ajax application. Also available is a recording of the webinar with audio at Nexaweb.com. Read more…

—NOW WITH OPERA STATISTICS—

Being a committer on the Apache XAP project, working on Ajax applications and Mashups for rockstarapps.com, I have personally run into many performance issues with JavaScript. Finding the problems can be very challenging especially if you didn’t write all the code or code base is very large. The issues may not be with code you were writing, but assumptions you made about what was going to perform the best.

Last week I gave a presentation on “Performance Tuning Your Ajax Application” at Ajax World, which was very well attended and I would like to thank those who participated, also “You all owe me a t-shirt ”. In the presentation I went over some of the findings that I have been working on for the last year. Click here, to open an application that will run through some low level JavaScript calls to check performance on each browser. Knowing how each browser will perform on basic functionality will allow developers to create best practices for code in their JavaScript library.

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