Ajax Performance

Back at full strength, playing catch up

I got the joyous call that my laptop was ready for pick-up yesterday, and we’ve spent the last 24 hours getting reacquainted. It’s amazing how much cooler and more stable a system runs with 2 working fans instead of 0. I queued up a few links of interest during my forced hiatus (note: I could, of course, have blogged from another system, but it just didn’t feel right). You know that means: bullet time!

• From Julien Lecomte of the ever active YUI team comes YUI Compressor, a new JS minification tool built on Rhino. Early returns show a significant performance gain over existing tools in the space, though speed limitations make this tool appropriate for ahead-of-time, rather than on-the-fly, compression. Comments on Julien’s blog show a few bugs turned up by early adopters, but that’s to be expected at this stage.
• Let’s stay on Yahoo! for a moment, shifting to YSlow. Jeff over at Coding Horror took a critical look at the new Firebug plugin in an article titled “YSlow: Yahoo’s Problems Are Not Your Problems.” While careful not to discredit Yahoo!’s methodology, Jeff worries that the advice embodied by YSlow can lead developers down the path of unproductive or potentially dangerous optimizations, particularly in cases where the YSlow guidance is more appropriate for very large sites.
• I made a bit of hay pre-iPhone release by playing iPhone Ajax apologist. Two months in, how do I feel? Well, I’m still hopeful that iterative improvements to iPhone Safari will make it the development platform I was expecting, but performance numbers such as those turned up by Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory worry me. We can’t expect developers to embrace the iPhone fully, despite the heroic efforts of Joe Hewitt, if native code on the iPhone holds such a huge speed advantage.
• I was going to talk about this article, but it really deserves its own post

Finally, I spent a chunk of time this weekend working on an article for IBM developerWorks. Expect more information as it gets closer to publication, assuming it doesn’t totally suck.