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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Over the last three years a tremendous effort has been made in the area of Ajax.  Toolkits, documentation, best practices, tools and tons and tons of applications have been created to make it easier for people to take advantage of Ajax in their own projects.   You can look around the web and read sites like; ajaxian.com and dzone.com to get the latest info and tip to make your site sparkle. The development community has taken charge and created great Ajax libraries like jQuery, Dojo, Prototype, Mootools, GWT.., which remove many of the issues a developer will run into with creating Ajax applications. Tool provides like; Apatana, Eclipse WTP, Firebug, and Nexaweb are continuing to release new versions with upgraded features, which simplify development.  But still it seems something is missing.

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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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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 am working on a summary of the interactions and solutions proposed and will get that online as a blog and new sample application.

This blog is all about feedback! I am interested in getting everyones input on a project I have been working on. It started out as a plugin for jQuery that uses a markup language that makes modification possible without any javascript. It works by allowing the server to output the markup as the response to a request, the library processes the response and performs the instructions. There are a couple samples have been put together that demonstrate this. 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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