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…

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…

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!

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…

I have been working on the creating a plugin for the Aptana IDE that will allow developers to create XAP applications as easily as they can using jQuery. Out of the box Aptana installs support for popular Ajax libraries, but unfortunately XAP is still building a community.

That plugin is now “finished”

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 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…