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

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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…

It’s been awhile since I last Blogged on rockstarapps.com.  In between my last Blog on May 26th and Today, I have been spending much of my time working on building the dojo.E library and traveling around the world (Koren, San Fransisco).  This week is the Ajax Experience Conference, which is one of my favorite conferences and one I have attended three times and talked at twice.  In coordination with the conference were two dojo developer day meetings.

Each day was filled with great information and a lot of cool demos. I was extremely impressed with what I saw. The things people are doing are way more advanced then simple Ajax enhancements. The are truly pushing the Browser, DOM, JavaScript to the edge. I saw fully native and cross browser charting and graphics; get these features right will mean Ajax over the next several years will be able to compete with the plugins (once IE6 is put to pasture).

Below are my take-a-ways from the two days listening to Dojo talks.

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There has been quite a bit of chatter lately on the change to Ext JS licensing. Working for a Ajax library/framework/platform vendor myself, I thought I would review the GPL and see how it would relate to an Ajax library. The GPL license was interesting and long. One thing with all licenses is that depending on what you are doing they apply differently.� GPL makes sense for lots of software, MySQL uses the license, the Java source is also GPL. Ajax is slightly different than either of those two products because of how the user interacts with the application.

Open Source licenses are definitely not my Bailiwick. This entry is more to understand and to prompt discussion.

I have updated the blog after more thought and some more reading.

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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…