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Blogs » Archive for July, 2006
OSCON 2006: Ajax Optimization Techniques
This week, Kevin Yank is reporting from OSCON 2006 in Portland, OR.
Kevin Henrikson of Zimbra gave a brisk presentation covering some of the lessons his organization has learned and the “dirty tricks” it has implemented to improve the performance of web applications that rely on large JavaScript/CSS codebases. Here’s a quick run-down of the items he covered. The slides of the talk are up on the Zimbra blog.
First, a great tool for spotting problems: Web Page Analyzer will report on the relative sizes of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images that make up any given page. Sometimes developers will work really hard to compress their images, only to serve hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript code, and this tool will let you spot such issues in a hurry.
Kevin’s first piece of advice was not to be afraid to combine multiple files into a single file. This works for both JavaScript and CSS, and although it doesn’t cut down on the size of the data, it can significantly improve load time because browsers will only request a certain number of files at once.
As I’ve covered before, compressing JavaScript can be a tricky problem to solve. There are a lot of tools out …
2006 Create: Awards for Excellence in Australian Design
The 2006 Create: Awards are on again, run by Desktop Magazine.
From the awards site:
Who’s the best Australian designer in 2006? Find out at the Desktop Create: Street Party, graphic design’s hottest party of the year! 7 category winners will secure $3000 each and one person will be crowned the winner by the end of the night, and will take away $8000!
Of particular interest is the fact that the two finalists in the website category represent a classic showdown: Flash vs. CSS. The pure-Flash brochure site for Elwood Jeans, complete with all its animation and in-your-face music, is up against Eric Fitzgerald’s clean, less showy portfolio site, which is built with web standards (it even validates XHTML 1.0 Strict!).
Niche Media, the folks behind the Create: Awards, have contacted me and informed me that Eric’s site in fact is not a short-listed site for the Create: Awards, as I incorrectly stated above. The three finalists are See for Elwood Jeans, the Tourism WA site and BMF, all of which are pure Flash sites. Apparently there were a few non-Flash entries but none of them made it into the final three. I’ll leave the link to Eric’s site and the surrounding commentary …
Will Microsoft Subsume Open Source?
Unfortunately, today became a very sad day in the .NET world. Kevin Downs, the brains and the brawn behind the very useful NDoc project, is giving up on the project and retiring from the community. I could enumerate his reasons, but Kevin’s own announcement is a far more eloquent document than I could produce.
OSCON 2006: Django: Web Development with Journalists’ Deadlines
This week, Kevin Yank is reporting from OSCON 2006 in Portland, OR.
Lead developer Jacob Kaplan-Moss bills Django as a competitor to Ruby on Rails. Django is a web development framework that was born at a small community newspaper in the city of Lawrence, Kansas, where it began its life as a content management system specialized for producing an online newspaper on tight deadlines.
Like Rails, Django leverages the strengths of an “alternative” language—specifically, Python—to provide a web development platform that takes away a lot of the annoyances that a particular class of developers face repeatedly.
Unlike Rails, Django doesn’t strictly conform to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture that is so popular in web frameworks right now. Django does have models, and they are extremely simple to write. Write a Python class, list a series of fields, their types, and any special attributes (such as maximum length), and Django will automatically generate a slick administration interface with full support for users, user levels, and a generous helping of conveniences such as pulling EXIF data out of submitted images.
The rest of Django feels significantly less like all the MVC frameworks out there. Everything circles around a slick, designer-friendly template engine, where templates can fit together …
OSCON 2006: Tim O’Reilly keynote
This week, Kevin Yank is reporting from OSCON 2006 in Portland, OR.Kicking off the first day of open sessions at OSCON today, Tim O’Reilly gave his perspectives on the state of open source, and some of the big ideas currently making waves:Architectures of Participation beyond software development (Web 2.0)As the champion of the Web 2.0 meme (and the associated conference), O’Reilly has plenty to say on the subject, and I’ve covered this before. The biggest characteristic of the Web 2.0 concept, he believes, is handing over the reins to the users, so that when your business begins to break through, your users feel like they made it happen, and become your biggest champions.Open Source Licenses are ObsoleteDespite huge efforts from entities like Apache, developers continue to build applications that don’t fit within existing licensing models. The main example cited by O’Reilly was Ning, a site where ordinary people can clone a web application they like, make a few changes, and launch it themselves in just a few clicks. Which license do you use for that?Asymmetric CompetitionSmall companies (like Craigslist) are competing with big companies (like Yahoo!). Fears that the commercial success of the web would shut out the smaller operations …
OSCON 2006: Rock-solid Web Development: Testing Web Apps
All this week, Kevin Yank is reporting from OSCON 2006 in Portland, OR.Presenter John Paul Ashenfelter provided the standard sales pitch for testing, but with a web development spin, and demonstrated both Selenium (a rich, in-browser testing framework that lets you write and run your tests using nothing more difficult than HTML and CSS) and The Grinder (a free load testing tool that can be cumbersome to use, but won’t cost you an arm and a leg). The slides and supporting materials from the tutorial are available on the TransitionPoint web site.Testing is a discipline in itself, with sub-disciplines like user testing, functional testing, and load testing. The desktop web development world—and to some extent, the enteprise web development world—is adopting all these types of testing at an impressive rate, but some of the unique challenges faced by web developers (e.g. multiple browsers) mean that testing is taking hold more slowly in that world. In this talk, Ashenfelter demonstrated the state of the art of testing in each of these sub-disciplines, where the tools involved range from the daunting to the inspiring.If you haven’t seen Selenium in action, you owe it to yourself as a web developer to at least …
The case against web 2.0
Via Simon, Gina Trapani asks some very relevant questions in the anti web 2.0…
I still prefer my text files and my own MySQL databases to anyone else’s, and I’m not sure why I’m so alone in that sentiment.
You’re certainly not alone but blogs, generally, only reinforce positive buzz, often uncritically. You’re also stepping into politics here, which doesn’t travel well on tech-blogs. Breaking my own habits for once though, I’ll put a toe in, by way of anecdote.
Back when I was at University doing a sandwich course, took a year working at IBM in London. One of my managers back then was something of an IBM high-flyer - interesting guy but I never knew quite what to say to him - generation gap, too much respect for elders and so on tied my tongue. Anyway - keeping this story short - we’d been at some IBM / customer conference all day, for the product we were involved with, and he gave me a lift home. Most of the way it was embarrassed silence, on my part, not knowing how to strike up a sustainable conversation. Then, seemingly out of the blue;
You know Harry; after three years, power corrupts. I’ve seen …
And the Award for Most Superfluous Use Of Ajax in a Mainstream Website goes to….
Ah,.. Ajax. It can be so nifty when it works well, but few technologies can lay a glove on it when it comes to making developers look (IMHO) silly. As Cameron Adams said recently:
Ajax gives web pages the ability to act as desktop applications using invisible data communication and seamless refreshing of individual page elements. This has the potential to either ruin the Web or propel it into a new era.
Here’s a nice example that I think contains a smidgen more from column A and a smidgen less from column B.
Art.com is a large, commerical art site selling prints to the public — over 300,000 of them, framed, mounted or otherwise. Their display pages are a model of efficient elegance — not dissimilar in style to Flickr in some ways — generally letting the artwork speak for itself.
But apparently, there wasn’t enough ‘wow-factor’. “We’re paying these developers — get them to come up with something that’s cool or hot or sick or whatever it is the kids want to be these days”.
So what was their solution?
Dropdowns have been reborn! If you click on a dropdown and expect it …
The benefits of sticking to it
Today a client of mine emailed me with great news. He is starting to see results from the last 6 months of his marketing efforts. For instance, his sales pipeline is heating up thanks to an educational letter and follow up campaign we worked on — including 2 recently closed deals. He just spoke at an association that serves his target market and landed a client and a lead that way. Plus he is actively getting referrals from his existing customers, which now number about 70.
But 4-5 months ago, things didn’t look so rosey. It is only thanks to a consistent, focused commitment to marketing that he has achieved these results.
While you can see instant results by marketing, it takes time and persistence to build momentum.
Hopefully you have a plan and are sticking to it. Don’t get frustrated. Results come to those who persist.
Some positive thinking guru used to tell the story of a bunch of gold diggers who dug a big hole looking for gold and eventually gave up. Then someone else claimed the land and found a huge supply of gold after digging only one foot more. Keep digging!
News Wire on Holiday
Although it still feels like the SitePoint News Wire has just started, I’m hitting the road for four weeks, and as its primary contributor I will only be able to post occasional updates during that time.
Watch for the SitePoint News Wire to return to full time in late August.
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