OSCON 2006: Ajax Optimization Techniques

Ajax is great, but getting it to work properly is a lot better. As Kevin points out below, there are some tricks to getting more out of Ajax, you just have to know how to make it happen…

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.

First, a great tool for spotting problems: Web Page Analyzer will report on the relative sizes of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images that make up any given page. Sometimes developers will work really hard to compress their images, only to serve hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript code, and this tool will let you spot such issues in a hurry.

Kevin’s first piece of advice was not to be afraid to combine multiple files into a single file. This works for both JavaScript and CSS, and although it doesn’t cut down on the size of the data, it can significantly improve load time because browsers will only request a certain number of files at once…. Source: SitePoint