Julien Lecomte: "Building High Performance Ajax Applications" December 14, 2007

(This event is open to all Yahoo! employees; it is not open to the public.)



speaker: Julien Lecomte, author of the YUI Browser History Manager and YUI Compressor

classroom 3, building C
webcast: none
video: YUI Theater the following week

abstract:
In the past few years, Ajax has become very popular because it has enabled developers to build more complex web applications. However, in the rush to push the browser to new limits, we have created a monster.

While the original goal of Ajax was to make web applications more responsive by not reloading the entire document every time something changed on the page, the use of DHTML has sometimes made the overall experience more sluggish because browsers were never really designed as application platforms, occasionally performing poorly while executing seemingly simple tasks.

Furthermore, many "traditional" application developers have recently moved to the browser, applying their existing skills to a radically different platform, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

Building on Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance Rules, this presentation discusses much of the Ajax community's common wisdom, and describes in great details what it takes to develop high performance Ajax applications. It includes a description of many different techniques, patterns, and best practices that could give your application a little "kick in the rear"...