AJAX Performance Tuning

Ahh... this was a good talk...

Here’s some meat and potatoes for me.

Optimization Strategies: scale down your development environment- both your client and your server, because users invariably have lower quality than developers; browser incompatibilities should be researched early; do performance testing as well as usability- start with single users, then go to multi users; use tools to test; QA last, then ship.

FUN FACT: These strategies mostly go back well into the 1970s, but don't tell anyone I know that.

Good AJAX design separates content (HTML, XML, XHTML) from CSS from script. That’s each goes in its own file folks.


De-reference unused objects:
Var foo = ‘blah’: // then do something
Delete foo;


Setup vars for your declensions. This goes WAY back in coding history:

This is bad
divs[i].style.color = white
divs[i].style.alignment = right
divs[i].style.blah = blah

This is good:
Ds = divs[i].style
Ds.color = white
Ds.alignment = right

And so on. Simple.


To do with pages: Put style sheets at top. Put script calls at bottom. We’re going to try this.