Tag Archives: performance tuning

Web Performance, Django CMS and Smileys

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Below is some links I got today in my inbox after different discussions on Twitter (follow me on Twitter). Putting them here for two reasons, first for myself, I may forget to read them otherwise, second, if any of you are interested in reading.

Hope to deliver more links tomorrow.

JavaOne 2009 Day 2 – My Input

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Google Web Toolkit

I started out day 2 of JavaOne attending a session on Google Web Toolkit, GWT is one of those things I do not know if I actually like. On one hand it is a cool framework that makes a lot of UI coding unecessary, but on the other hand black-box-solutions is not my cup of tea. But, if you are a big team of developers it is a big advantage of course to use such a framework/toolkit making sure you are building the web the same everywhere in your corporation. The presentation was ok, I was a bit tired but I think I got a good idea on how I can start using GWT and still have some flexibility when it comes to the “magic” JavaScript parts.

Ajax Performance and Tuning

I was really looking forward to this session, it was a good session, but it was no news actually. They stepped through how to speed up your website using Yslow measures and guidelines, if you have read Steve Souders blog and his book High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers (his upcoming book on Web Site Performance: Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers)you know all those things already, but I am not from the Java-world, so maybe this is new news to the Java Community. Greg Murray from Netflix showed a framework named Protorabbit which takes care of all these steps for you, they used Protorabbit on stage to show how easy they could adapt the Java Pet Store to actually grade A on Yslow. The presentation was ok, and I found Protorabbit, that is extra plus.

Creating Compelling User Experience

Ben Galbraith from Ajaxian and Mozilla talked to the tech-savvy audience on User Experience, no code, just talk about responsive UI:s, perceived performance, look and feel and usability. I think it was a very important session as there are a somewhat technical focus on software development in general and trying to actually get traditional back-end developers to focus on front-end things is a good thing.

Functional and Object Oriented JavaScript

I have known it for 10 years, but it seems the rest of the world is just about to start loving JavaScript. For me JavaScript is the language closest at hand when thinking of solving a problem, and I am very glad to see how JavaScript have evolved from a crappy web script langugage to a well respected, and fast, language that runs on both clients and servers. This session focused on teaching traditional Java developers the core of JavaScript. Closures, anonymous functions and common problems Java developers could fall into when starting writing JavaScript (scope). The presentation is really good (academic) and goes into the real good and advanced parts of the worlds best language.  BTW, Prototype and Scriptaculous seems to be the bomb in the Java world.

4 Great Books for Increasing Revenue From Your Website

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Right now I am reading two books on the benefits of collective intelligence, and have just finished two others with focus on optimizing your website technically, in conversion rates, through usability and performance.

All these books are of interest to people who takes a scientific approach to developing and tuning the website he/she is running.

High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders

Steve Souders covers all the different sections from YSlow on how to speed up your website. He shows that you will get most effect from putting your efforts into perfomance tune the frontend before working on backend tuning. I found this book really worth reading as it is spot on on every issue, and very focused on describing gains and implementation details for each and every single section of performance tuning on the frontend. I really recommend this book because I feel that for a serious website owner this book will pay itself in a couple of weeks with more generated sales and less used bandwidth.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

Andrew B. King also focus on optimization and tuning of your website, but the focus is on SEO, PPC-campaigns and Conversion Rate Optimization. He also tries to write some chapters on performance tuning, but when it comes to frontend performance tuning I recommend Steve Souders book instead. This book is really good for people who would like to learn more about optimizing PPC-campaigns and start tracking and incread conversion rates. I recommend this book for those chapters, which are really good and have help me increase incomes on the websites I have PPC-campaigns for.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran

Toby Segaran guides us in building smarter web applications based on Collective Intelligence. The book mixes theory and practice and shows how “easy” it is to actually create applications with community based product recommendation system and other intelligent solutions. I found this book interesting as a starting point on how to technically implement some of the web 2.0 features users have become used to use online.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

Wikinomics is the book I have just started reading and it focus on how the community trend will change the enterprises. The focus is on how the masses create something of big value through collaboration. An interesting thing of course is the fact that a lot of people interact in larger communities building a greater value (Wikipedia, Youtube, Linux etc, etc) without getting paid, still the quality of the outcome often exceeds the alternatives built traditionally with labour and investment banks.

Buy this book on Amazon.com