Building performant web applications
Since we’re all building increasingly complex web applications it’s important to focus on the performance of those apps as that is a key determination of the user experience. Unfortunately, it’s also a bit of a black art. There are a slew of different factors in web app performance, which also vary greatly from browser to browser.
One of the best resources out there is a guy called Steve Souders, who used to work for Yahoo and now works for Google. His first presentation about site performance is full of little gems that every self respecting web developer should at least think about.
He’s now released a new presentation which takes some of these ideas even further. One of the key lessons in this presentation is focusing on loading the “front end” of the wep app first. That is, the part the user must see and interact with immediately, and delaying loading those parts that are not needed until later.
Not content with slideware, he also has created a couple of tools to help:
- Yslow: a Firefox plugin that measures the stages of loading a web page
- Cuzillion: a new tool for investigating the performance impact of different DOM elements
Check out the blog post about Cuzillion here.
Understanding the implications of how and in what order you load your resources is key to performance. Especially in the Portlets world where you are going to be on a page with a bunch of other portlets. I would highly recommend taking a glance through his presentations for ideas on optimizing your webapps.
Technorati Tags: webapps, performance
