Infrequently Noted » performance

Automated Dojo Layer Builds in ZF 1.9.0 Preview

alex — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:18:07 +0000

Early on in discussions with the excellent folks at Zend, one of the possibilities that made everyone in the room excited was the ability to use server-side smarts about client-side work to automate performance optimizations in ZF apps. After lots of great work on getting Dojo integrated, Zend Framework is making that a reality by support automated custom builds in ZF 1.9.0′s preview release.

What does this buy you? You get to use the Zend helpers for Dojo as you normally would, simplifying how you pull in code, declare components, and build your UI. What this new integration saves you is the tedium of figuring out which components you’re using everywhere, building a layer file for it, kicking off a build, and remembering to re-visit the layer definition when you project adds or removes modules. Hopefully ZF 1.9 should lower the barrier to taking advantage of the full range of Dojo-based optimizations, making it easier to prototype quickly and deploy easily. Exciting stuff!

Online Shrinksafe App Fixed

alex — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:10:11 +0000

I’m not sure how long it was b0rked, but the online ShrinkSafe app is back up and working.

Dojo Wins Mobile Slickspeed Shootout

alex — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:26:46 +0000

Stefan K. has posted a fascinating run-down of mobile browser performance with regards to JavaScript toolkits. No big shock, but Dojo once again brings home the bacon. I’d love to see these tests re-run with TaskSpeed instead of SlickSpeed, but when you’re doing progressive enhancement it turns out that selector engine performance really matters. Dojo continues to do very well in both TaskSpeed and SlickSpeed because the Acme selector engine is so darned fast. In the real world, selector speed matters and the faster it gets, the more queries we seem to do.

I’m not entirely sold that the right solution going forward is to use the toolkits we already have, but if you’re building a mobile app today and you’re going to use a toolkit, it looks like (as on desktop browsers), Dojo should be your first choice. The webkitMobile variant of Dojo points to one possible way out of the “what to do about mobile?” conundrum regarding size and IE-induced bloat, but I have some hope that WebKit will improve quickly enough to make the toolkits of today obsolete on mobile phones entirely. Time will tell.

Hat tip: the Uxebu blog