It’s been awhile since I last Blogged on rockstarapps.com.  In between my last Blog on May 26th and Today, I have been spending much of my time working on building the dojo.E library and traveling around the world (Koren, San Fransisco).  This week is the Ajax Experience Conference, which is one of my favorite conferences and one I have attended three times and talked at twice.  In coordination with the conference were two dojo developer day meetings.

Each day was filled with great information and a lot of cool demos. I was extremely impressed with what I saw. The things people are doing are way more advanced then simple Ajax enhancements. The are truly pushing the Browser, DOM, JavaScript to the edge. I saw fully native and cross browser charting and graphics; get these features right will mean Ajax over the next several years will be able to compete with the plugins (once IE6 is put to pasture).

Below are my take-a-ways from the two days listening to Dojo talks.

Read more…

Web performance has been a topic I have been working on for quite some time now. While building Nexaweb’s Ajax library we ran into and solved many challenges that developers will face while developing their own Ajax applications. Most of my effort has been around JavaScript performance and Ajax’s impact on a websites performance.
Ajax’s Impact on site performance

• Increased Number of Requests
• Increased Download Size
• Increased JavaScript Code

Upcoming Webinar

On Thursday at 2:00pm myself and Ryan Breen from Gomez and Ajax Performance.com will be giving a free 2 hour webinar covering all things performance. Usually, I do this webinar by myself, so I am excited to get another person on board to give their perspective on Website performance. Ryan will be talking about:

• Survey tools available for performance analysis
• Establish and follow a site optimization workflow
• Explore real world examples of how to improve the end user experience

▪kk

Go to Webex.com and sign up, its free, you can ask questions and we will be handing out information on how you can optimize the performance of your Website / Web application.

Sign up for the Webinar now!

Read more…

The other day on TechCrunch was an article about Microsoft’s Popfly Mashup builder getting a game creator interface. Previously, I looked at Popfly for building Mashups but didn’t get past the Wack-a-mole Mashup, so this time I figured I would get the only person I know who has created games.

It is a tough road getting kids who have an interest in software, started in a structured way. Game software offers many of the skills that developers will need in the long run. Products GameMaker, Popfly and even flash give kids a nice tools that keep them interested and allow them to explore software until they are capable using structured languages. Read more…

I am sitting in a hotel room in Ireland waiting to get on a conference call. Why am I in Ireland? On Wednesday, I will giving a presentation at the XTech 2008 conference.

While I am sitting here, I figured I would create a Blog of these screen shots of various web pages. Mostly of things I couldn’t figure out or that were really badly designed. Read more…

There has been quite a bit of chatter lately on the change to Ext JS licensing. Working for a Ajax library/framework/platform vendor myself, I thought I would review the GPL and see how it would relate to an Ajax library. The GPL license was interesting and long. One thing with all licenses is that depending on what you are doing they apply differently.� GPL makes sense for lots of software, MySQL uses the license, the Java source is also GPL. Ajax is slightly different than either of those two products because of how the user interacts with the application.

Open Source licenses are definitely not my Bailiwick. This entry is more to understand and to prompt discussion.

I have updated the blog after more thought and some more reading.

Read more…

jsLex Motivation

I started jsLex over a year ago and have been adding features and fixing bugs for all those that asked. The project initially started out as a way to find out what was taking up all the size in my JavaScript files. That’s where the name came from, JavaScript Lexiconical Analyzer or jsLex for short. Even though that feature is still in there and very useful, the project has continued to evolve. Next, I added the JavaScript metricing that makes it possible to find performance bottlenecks with large Ajax application using any web browser.

Now, this version of the project has taken the project to the next level. Over the last year I have talked at many conferences about ways to optimize Ajax applications; reduce the number of requests and reduce the size of the requests. Many others out there have done even more to educate people on ways to do this using a variety of techniques. The issue with using many of the techniques, they are almost always command line driven. I’m a IDE user, so things not integrated into Eclipse are a pain in the ass. Read more…