Web Info & Tutorials

Ryan Breen has written up a detailed post on Circumventing browser connection limits for fun and profit in which he discusses the old-fashion limits of 2 connections per HTTP/1.1 per host, and the benefit you get from a simple CNAME hack.

The average load time when using 2 connections is 7.919 seconds. The average load time when using 6 connections is 4.629 seconds. That’s a greater than 40% drop in page load time. This technique will work anywhere that you have a large block of object requests currently served by one host.

There is plenty of precedent for this approach in real world Ajax apps. To exploit connection parallelism, the image tiles at Google Maps are served from mt0.google.com through mt3.google.com. Virtual Earth also uses this technique.

You can also use this connection management approach to sandbox the performance of different parts of your application. If you have page elements that require database access and may be more latent than static objects, keep them from clogging up the 2 connections for image content by putting them on a subdomain. This trick won’t cause a huge improvement in the total load time of your page, but it can significantly improve the perceived performance by allowing static content to load unfettered.

You have to hand it to the jQuery guys, they work really hard with their community.

There have been a few posts recently that relate to the jQuery world:

jQuery 1.0.4 Release

A new 1.0.4 release focused on updates to the Ajax functionality:

• Extensions to $.ajax()
  • Add extra headers to an Ajax request using beforeSend
  • Perform a synchronous Ajax request
  • Sending a JavaScript object using processData
  • Aborting an Ajax request after a specific delay in time
• AJAX module: The public $.ajax API is now used internally
• New global Ajax handler: ajaxSend - called before an Ajax request is sent.
• Extensions to global Ajax handlers: ajaxSend, ajaxSuccess, ajaxError and ajaxComplete get XMLHttpRequest and settings passed as arguments.
• Extensions to event handling: pageX and pageY are available in all browsers now. (IE does not provide native pageX/Y).
• Improved docs: $(String) method has now two separate descriptions, one for selecting elements, one for creating html on-the-fly.
• FX module: Most inline styles added by animations are now removed when the animation is complete, eg. height style when animating height (exception: display styles).

Documentation

The community is trying to help you understand jQuery.

Meet the team

John tries to get the names out, so you feel like the team is really part of the community. To promote this he just posted about the team behind jQuery.

Paco Avila and his aggroup hit declared OpenKM, a writing direction / noesis direction grouping that looks same a screen application.

OpenKM is supported on:

• JBoss 4.0.3SP1 ( edition foundation for the utilization )
• Java J2EE ( JDK 1.5 )
• Jackrabbit
• GWT ( Google Web Toolkit - Ajax )

It is engrossing to wager a GWT covering that looks same a YUI supported factor set.

Yahoo! Movies seems to have had a make over (or I have been on another planet recently):

It matches the recent makeovers of Yahoo! TV and the main homepage, consisting of common widgets such as carrousels from the world of YUI.

There is also a fair amount of Flash to do some of the heavy lifting.

All of the features from the old Y!Movies seem to be intact, so there will probably not be an outcry like we had with Y!TV.

It doesn't seem to remember my zip like the old site did, and it seems that mostly the front page has the revamp. The show-times sections all look the same as before.