Archive for the ‘WebDev’ Category

HTTPS/SSL Tunneling and Proxy Server

Friday, November 14th, 2008

HTTPS Tunneling, also called HTTPS Proxy, SSL proxy, or SSL tunneling, refers to sending HTTPS content via a proxy server. This is a very common usage scenario over the web. Unfortunately, I have not found any Java server that supports this yet. Tomcat chokes up quickly if ...

Razor Optimizer, a New Approach for Ajax Optimization

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

I am excited to announce the early beta release of Razor Optimizer, a JavaScript optimization tool for reducing code footprint and increasing runtime performnace. As a cross-browser web application itself, Razor Optimizer can be access either online as a service, or to be downloaded to run locally. ...

JavaScript Optimization Techniques Today

Monday, October 27th, 2008

The wild popularity of Ajax fueled widespread usage of JavaScript. Almost every web 2.0 application relies on JavaScript to deliver front end interactivity. A growing list of JavaScript libraries (over 200+) are being created by various Ajax developers, some of which have gathered significant community adoption. Though the usage of ...

Yahoo’s Performance Rules

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Yahoo’s Performance team summarized their experience in web performance optimization into 14 rules in general (Reference 4, http://stevesouders.com/examples/rules.php): 1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests 2. Use a Content Delivery Network 3. Add an Expires Header 4. Gzip Components 5. Put Stylesheets at the Top 6. Put Scripts at the Bottom 7. Avoid CSS Expressions 8. Make JavaScript and CSS External 9. Reduce DNS Lookups 10. Minify JavaScript 11. Avoid Redirects 12. Remove Duplicate Scripts 13. Configure ETags 14. Make ...

Front End Performance and Today’s Typical Web Sites

Monday, October 27th, 2008

In order to understand how the front end, especially JavaScript, is impacting web performance today, some typical web pages were studied. The following table shows content composition of the front pages of two representative web sites, American Airline (www.aa.com) and FaceBook (www.facebook.com): Table 1: Content Composition of Selected Web Sites aa.com ...

Web Peformance Factors

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Every web application requires satisfactory performance in order to be functional. Every web application has its own context that different factors influence performance differently. Since the beginning of the web, there have been many performance tuning endeavors responding to what the context calls for. A good metric to gauge web performance ...

JavaScript Execution Context, Closure, Eval and “this” Keyword

Saturday, September 13th, 2008

These are a few key concepts of JavaScript language that developers should know: execution context, activation object, variable instantiation, scoping, closure, eval and "this" keyword. Knowing these would help one tremendously in Ajax development. For example, when you write an inner function, you know that you can access the ...

Ajax-heavy Applications on Google Chrome

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

"This is the best browser so far" is that I can say after being a Chrome user for one day.  First of all, I was glad to find out that I haven't found Chrome breaking any web application yet, especially Ajax applications. I was a little concerned about this, given that ...

The 64KB Java Language Problem - Lesson Learned from Using Rhino to Process JavaScript

Monday, September 1st, 2008

This entry documents a few tips related to using Rhino JavaScript Engine to process JavaScript code. If you are using Rhino, you probably won't run into the issues covered in this post during development or even testing. However, you are fairly likely to run into these issues after your system ...

Razor Profiler - An Automated JavaScript Profiling Tool

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

Razor Profiler (beta), an online Ajax profiling tool, is available for public review now at http://www.razorspeed.com. What Is it? Razor Profiler(beta) is a web-based Ajax profiling tool to help web developers understand and analyze the runtime behavior ...

OpenAjax Publishes Future Browser Feature Wish List Results

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

What does the Ajax community want from future browsers? How are these different requests prioritized? Web developers have done amazing things with Ajax for both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications, but what barriers need to be removed to enable the next generation of browser-based innovations? The future of Ajax ...

Time to Vote - Ajax Feature Wish List

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

What would you like to see in the next generation of browsers? Can you help to make the web a slightly better place than where it is today? Various people from the Ajax community have put together a good list of feature requests (a total of over 40), collected at OpenAjax ...

OpenAjax F2F Meeting at NYC

Monday, March 24th, 2008

The F2F meeting of OpenAjax Alliance at NYC on March 21st worked out really well in my oppinion. As a result of the last F2F meeting in October 2007, we formed a new task force called "Runtime Advocacy Task Force" at OpenAjax. The goal of Runtime Task Force is to collect ...

Possible Solutions to Web Security Issues

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

The “Same Origin Policy” is at the core of browser’s security model. Under the “Same Origin Policy”, a web resource can only interact with another web resource if and only if both resources are from the same origin. However, “Cross site scripting” and “cookie” both brings security challenges in ...

A Study of Ajax Performance Issues

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Introduction: Ajax application performance largely depends on the performance of JavaScript execution and browser DOM operations. I've heard various people saying various things about Ajax performance. Some people say JavaScript is just too slow. Some people say that the problem is not JavaScript but rather Browser DOM being too slow. ...