Recent Javascript

• Deconstructing your web application’s performance with PageTest

  YSlow is an awesome tool. One thing I would recommend as a feature request would be to have a more verbose reporting component. Incidentally, there is a tool that was released not too long ago by a developer on the Exceptional Performance mailing list. It is called PageTest. Furthermore, PageTest uses the YSlow criteria for [...]

  March 30th, 2008

• Increasing drag/drop performance with iframes, images, and forms

  If you’re using YUI, Prototype, or MooTools and you’re building an application that involves draggable components containing iframes, images, and/or forms, here’s a quick tip to maximize performance during the onDrag event.
  Here is a code snippet of basic markup that’ll represent our draggable component.

  <div class="moduleContainer"> <div class="moduleHead">Draggable Title</div> <div class="moduleBody">Draggable Content</div> </div>

  Inside your moduleBody, you could have a plethora of component types, but [...]

  March 29th, 2008

• IE6, Flash, mod_gzip/mod_deflate: Problem and Solution

  Problem Analysis
  While doing some front-end performance enhancements on a project that utilized extensive javascript and flash, I found that IE6 doesn’t like it when you compress text/xml with mod_deflate/mod_gzip. From a user perspective, the Flash component would show, but any XML data being transferred to the Flash component will be rejected–you get a blank canvas/UI [...]

  December 20th, 2007

• AJAX Games — Bringing back the Old School

  I recently saw a cool Brickles AJAX game made with Prototype.js. The website goes into detail about how to create the game–showing how to develop the classes/objects and explaining how the user interacts with the game.
  Do you remember playing classic games, such as, Pac-man, Brickles, Hangman, and Carmen Sandiego in black and white? Do you [...]

  July 31st, 2007

• Mac OS X Safari > Windows Safari on insertBefore

  While testing out XWNED Dashboard on Windows Safari, I realized that using
  onDrag events and insertBefore() javascript function performs horribly.
  It’s not just my implementation either–I tested out iGoogle, Pageflakes,
  as well as, Netvibes. Same behaviour. Very interesting.

  June 30th, 2007