Ajax Performance

Cuzillion: simplifying page prototyping

Testing new arrangements of DOM elements to improve the object load order or parallelism can be a bit of a cumbersome task. Fire up a text editor, create a test page with a meaningful name, hit with different browsers, and repeat a few hundred times. As an exemplar of the old aphorism that good programmers are lazy, Steve Souders (formerly of Yahoo!, now of Google) created Cuzillion to remove some of the friction from these testing cycles.

Cuzillion is a simple web app that allows for easy arrangement of different page elements (external scripts, images, stylesheets) within a DOM. These sample pages are each defined by a simple restian URL, so they can be shared with other developers as examples of what to do (or what not to do). Loading a page in Cuzillion also reports a high level number for page load time and some micro-metrics from within the page (the time to load an inline script, for example). You can use Page Detailer or HttpWatch to get a more detailed analysis of object load order.

When YSlow was released last year, one of the aspects of the project that excited me the most was the documentation it provided: just by ranking specific performance decisions made by the application, it served to educate developers on what they can do better. I could see a community developing around Cuzillion to serve a similar purpose, especially as the tool expands to handle more DOM elements or object load techniques (such as external scripts referenced via document.createElement).