Ajax Performance

Catching up on the news bin

January was a brutal month for work and play, so I haven’t been around here as often as I would like. I’ve also accumulated a bit of a backlog of small news items. So, let’s churn through those:

• Local storage is all the buzz. Ajaxian carried a brief summary of the latest news in the space yesterday, including a very detailed article by Niall Kennedy explaining the technique and the upside. Meanwhile, the irrepressible Brad Neuberg continues realizing that potential with Dojo Offline.
• In other Dojo news, Alex Russell posted a brief gripe about the incredible slowness of regular expressions, especially for replacements. The gripe included a link to a very detailed survey of regex suckage on multiple platforms, for those who want the deep dive.
• Contrarian Peter Michaux thinks there is still a window.onload problem, despite previous declarations of victory by Dean Edwards. By way of background, Peter’s article begins with the need for a cross-browser DOMContentLoaded event before embarking on a historical tour of attempted solutions. Finally, Peter arrives at the increasingly popular DOM polling technique as the best solution. Great article.
• If you’ve read many of my articles here, you know that I’m a big believer in perceived performance. Often times in a complex app, you are constrained by technical factors out of your control (a slow, aging database, for example), but you can still improve user experience by hiding that latency behind careful design decisions. On the flip side, as this editorial by Dion of Ajaxian shows, it’s even easier to make poor design decisions that kill perceived performance.