Web Info & Tutorials

Endless.com is a new site created by Amazon “in response to customers’ desires to shop a destination dedicated to shoes and handbags”.

They have created a very rich experience that is highly dynamic including:

• Ajax pagination
• Image zooming to get closer
• Dynamically changing other choices as you mouse over an element (e.g. mouse over the size and the price and colors could change)
• Instant feedback to let you know if you have to select more items to get work done

They didn’t go over the top, and instead kept the site very clean and simple.

What do you think?

Tom Yeh over at the ZK project has released his roadmap for 2007. It’s an intriguing list of tools, features, and developer support:

• Expanded support for data binding.
• A visual design tool for Eclipse.
• Support from mobile platforms: ZK Mobile, a Java ME client, will be released in the first half of 2007.
• To work with existing applications more efficiently, ZK components will be available in the form of JSP tags. Maybe also as JSF components.
• Support for browsers without Javascript.
• Support for other scripting languages than Java, such as Groovy and Ruby.
• ZK books and more online tutorials.
• “Mega” components, such as spreadsheets, forums, etc.

Lots of good stuff, especially the news about ZK Mobile and the visual design tool.

One thing I’d like to see happen with ZK (and Echo2, the other, similar server-side framework), is the development of something similar to the Spring Rich Client framework. What is Spring Rich Client?

The Spring Rich Client Project (RCP) is a sub-project of The Spring Framework. Spring-RCP’s mission is to provide an elegant way to build highly-configurable, GUI-standards-following rich-client applications faster by leveraging the Spring Framework, and a rich library of UI factories and support classes. Initial focus is on providing support for Swing applications but a goal of Spring-RCP is to be view agnostic as much as possible.

Both ZK and Echo2 resemble desktop GUI frameworks, and thus could benefit in the same way as Swing. In fact, if Spring-RCP is truly view agnostic, it might make sense to try to use Spring-RCP directly.

Sidekiq is a newborn see place matured by the guys that brought us Ajax Agent.

Sidekiq is an Ajax supported see engine portal. It uses a compounding of Web 2.0 app utilization techniques same Ajax, unseeable iFrame hacks & individual activity analytics to action simultaneous searches from binary sites. Users crapper action see in different categories including video, audio, ethnic bookmarks, people, employment, actual estate, shopping, travel, downloads, movies & some other. Search results are obtained from more than digit crowning see engines in apiece category.

Tenni Theurer has posted a second part of performance research on Browser Cache Usage - Exposed!.

The article measures the performance of yahoo.com with a full cache compared to an empty one (2.4s vs. 0.9s) and then shows a surprisingly low number of people heading over cached up:

40-60% of Yahoo!’s users have an empty cache experience and ~20% of all page views are done with an empty cache. To my knowledge, there’s no other research that shows this kind of information. And I don’t know about you, but these results came to us as a big surprise. It says that even if your assets are optimized for maximum caching, there are a significant number of users that will always have an empty cache. This goes back to the earlier point that reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on reducing response time. The percentage of users with an empty cache for different web pages may vary, especially for pages with a high number of active (daily) users. However, we found in our study that regardless of usage patterns, the percentage of page views with an empty cache is always ~20%.

Conclusion: Keep in mind the empty cache user experience. It might be more prevalent than you think!

I first heard of Gliffy via the Confluence plugin.

Gliffy is a web based diagram tool that lets you build and share any type of diagram. They are pretty too.

In August and November, we highlighted parts one and two of the IE team’s JScript action tips. saint Gurevich is backwards for conception three:

1. Avoid Closures if Possible. What happens when [a approaching qualified as an circumstance listener] never fires? We wait it to, but it strength not. If it doesn’t fire, the approaching [may have] a meaning to [a] maker goal and the maker goal backwards to the closure. This is an inherent broadside reference, hornlike to spot, and IE leaks memory. This is never beatific for performance.
2. Don’t ingest Property Accessor Functions. A ordinary framework in goal familiarised planning is to ingest concept accessor functions… in the modify of [get/set]_PropertyName (or some others depending on the style)… [This makes for] intense JScript.