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Ajax Optimization Techniques Talk (OSCON 2006)

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Presentation, Conferences — Chris Cornutt at 7:46 am on Thursday, July 27, 2006

On the SitePoint Blogs today, “live” from this year’s OSCON, there’s a new post covering the talk from Kevin Henrikson concerning how to squeeze the most out of your Ajax connections - a few handy optimization techniques.

Kevin Henrikson of Zimbra gave a brisk presentation covering some of the lessons his organization has learned and the “dirty tricks” it has implemented to improve the performance of web applications that rely on large JavaScript/CSS codebases. Here’s a quick run-down of the items he covered. The slides of the talk are up on the Zimbra blog.

Among the tips mentioned are:

using a web page analyzer to find the trouble spots in your pages
Javascript compression tools to reduce the size even more
properly structured HTML to make for faster rendering times

The post also mentions two of the case studies Kevin did - one centered around a blog post he did on optimization and the other on lala.com. Check out the slides for the full story…

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MODx : CMS

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Showcase, Ajax, Server, Framework, Presentation, Examples — Admin at 3:12 am on Monday, July 3, 2006

MODx is a content management system with AJAX goodness (or Web 2.0 as they say). The code is neat and gives a true CMS feel. Though I liked the admin Interface more, the panel offers a wide range of options , Tools, extra plugins , stats checking etc. like a true CMS .

I should say it does a lot more than other AJAX based scripts like AJAXpress and AJAX Portal . But still it needs a lot more to get into high level category of scripts like Joomla and Wordpress.

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AJAXLaunch’s AJAXTunes and ajaxXLS

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Showcase, Ajax, Presentation, Media — Admin at 3:09 am on Monday, July 3, 2006

After launch of AJAXwrite Ajaxsketch and eyespot AJAXlaunch is all set for two new applications AJAXtunes and AjaxXLS .

ajaxTunes is a web-based media player that lets you play, pause, forward and rewind high-quality streaming music straight from the Internet on any computer. Try ajaxTunes immediately, it has been preloaded with a demo account containing more than 25 songs encoded at 192kbps from different albums and a great mix of playlists from select artists. Or, create your own music locker and choose from over 40,000 songs to create your personal playlists. ajaxTunes is a fully interactive application that will allow you to connect to hours of music, FREE.
ajaxXLS 0.5 viewer is a web-based viewer application with a look and feel similar to Microsoft Excel. With one click you can easily open any .xls file in just a few seconds. The interactivity and responsiveness provided by AJAX programming allows you to enjoy the power and utility of a spreadsheet without the cost of conventional software.

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RailsConf 2006: Rails on Ajax by Justin Gehtland

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Ajax, Prototype, Conference, Ruby, Presentation — Rob Sanheim at 2:09 pm on Saturday, June 24, 2006

(Note From Rob: This session write up comes courtesy of Jim Halberg. Jim is not an official Ajaxian, though he dreams about being one when he grows up. Thanks, Jim!)

Are we still at the point where a talk on ajax must start with the "What is ajax?" question? Well, at least the explanations seem to be getting shorter =) (Rob: note to conference speakers - can we please just assume basic Ajax knowledge at this point?!)

Justin spent the majority of the presentation showing uncluttered examples of various Rails/Ajax/Prototype capabilities. Auto-complete search, drag-drop, and the like. These were delivered in a "if you haven't played with this yet" sort of way but he also managed to keep it quick enough - and drop in enough 'even if you've done this before you may not know about this' tidbits to keep the more experienced portion of the audience interested.

There was some talk on RJS and he spent some time on the always requested ajax topics… How do you deal with JavaScript disabled? What if a user has an old browser? How do you handle the introduction of new idioms?

The presentation ended with a bang as he demo'd creating an application with the soon to be released Streamlined. Streamlined is an open source framework, developed by Relevance LLC, to bring the simplicity of ActiveRecord to the view layer (coincidentally, this is #2 of the "3 Unsolved Problems" posed in Dave Thomas keynote yesterday). This is really slick - a lot of functionality - good looking (although they are looking for a designer to contribute some improvements) - and best of all: _very_ quick and powerful. I'm definitely looking forward to this being released at OSCON.