Part 2 : Performance
The second part of the book focuses on performance, efficiency, and speed. Here, you will discover techniques for ensuring that end users get a more responsive user interface, while reducing the bandwidth burden on your hosting provider.
Chapter 3 : Understanding the Web Browser
The web browser acts as a facilitator—downloading, rendering, and executing your web application for your end users. The web browser has the power and potential to make simple code look like a glossy magazine article (in the case of Apple’s Safari browser) or as plain text without any images or advanced abilities (in the case of the open source Lynx browser, available from http://lynx.isc.org/).
This chapter explains how web browsers work internally to put together the page your users see on their screen based on the code you’ve written. It also describes how web pages get to your browser over your network connection, and highlights a number of points of contention that can hinder performance.
Chapter 4 : Performance Tweaking
In this chapter, we will look at how to make your web page come to life, ready for your visitors to use in their web browser, as quickly as possible. Studies have shown that users don’t notice good performance, but they do feel hurt by poor performance. People expect their web sites to load as soon as they make a request for it. Why should we give them any less of an experience than they expect? The key here is efficiency—getting the most data downloaded to the browser in the quickest time.
Chapter 5 : Smoke and Mirrors: Perceived Responsiveness
The previous chapter covered the topic of code performance and efficiency, including many suggestions to help improve your end users’ experience with your RIAs. Unfortunately, no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to reduce the amount of time required for certain actions. Ajax requests, for example, are limited by the quality of the network connection between the browser and server.
As web developers, we need to figure out how to keep our end users informed that things are occurring behind the scenes, and give them the impression that they are receiving a fast, responsive web browsing experience, despite these holdups. This chapter covers this issue of perceived responsiveness, rather than actual performance—the art of illusion and “smoke and mirrors” to provide the impression of a fast and responsive web application in those times when the browser and server just can’t produce actual results quickly enough.