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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I am sitting in a hotel room in Ireland waiting to get on a conference call. Why am I in Ireland? On Wednesday, I will giving a presentation at the XTech 2008 conference.

While I am sitting here, I figured I would create a Blog of these screen shots of various web pages. Mostly of things I couldn’t figure out or that were really badly designed. Read more…

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…

First, let me thank everyone that commented and read the last blog, “How do you store a tree in a database table?” The feedback was great and helpful for everyone including myself. Probably one of the best interactions between the readers I have seen. I just hope Roustabout and Joe Celko don’t run into each other at a SQL World 2008 and if they do they by each other a beer.

I didn’t expect as much feedback or hits as the posting got, I figured every one shelved their databases for REST/JSON services by now

Approaches that came out of the last blog

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Every once and a while I will need to need to store a hierarchical structure in a database table. Recently, I needed to do this for a Facebook.com application I am building. In this particular application, I needed to categorize pieces of content in a hierarchical form, which a users can access by drilling down one level at a time. This blog details the solution I implemented on how to store the data and access it. Aren’t there are other articles on this? Yes, but their approach is typically very trivial and has issues when building out the application.

Included at the bottom of this blog entry is a zip of a sample application that demonstrates how to build product explorer using the technique described.

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