Comments on: Making Ajax Applications Scream on the Client

By: Mone

Mone — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:31:29 +0000

Hi, I don’t understand why the with statement should be so costly. It should just add an object in front of the scope chain.
Is meant that any time an identifier is not present in the object used on the with statement there is one more object to check?
A function is more expensive than a with statement from this point of view.
What is meant with “use manual iterators”?

By: erlando

erlando — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:23:16 +0000

What is it with Microsoft and the licensing for these tools. Again we have an example of a potentially very useful tool for web developers everywhere and then this bit of text in the license ruins it all:

“You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes would be running business operations, licensing, leasing, or selling the Software, distributing the Software for use with commercial products, using the Software in the creation or use of commercial products or any other activity which purpose is to procure a commercial gain to you or others.”

WTH Microsoft? Why can’t I use this app where it would be the most useful?

By: Peter Michaux

Peter Michaux — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 22:33:44 +0000

When will people please stop spelling it “Ajax” when they mean to spell it “browser scripting”? We are programmers. Spelling counts.

By: balupton

balupton — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 08:59:22 +0000

Some great tips there. I especially like the one about making references to function calls to use within for loops.

One thing that I do in my applications is use cookies to transfer data, rather than http requests. I’m surprised that this was not mentioned.

One concern I have about speculative downloads is that it could cause serious bandwidth problems, if what is loaded is not actually used.

By: Frank Thuerigen

Frank Thuerigen — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 05:46:41 +0000

EDIT: I also have to say, if “document.body.all” is shown in an example of caching a collection of DOM elements, the title of the presentation should have been “How to make AJAX applications scream on the IE” or “How to make AJAX applications whine on the client” ;-)

By: Frank Thuerigen

Frank Thuerigen — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 05:31:20 +0000

@Andy – u r right but in order to know what to expect on IE8 and MS in general its valuable to know their way of thinking… I am past the stage of of hating IE, I just deal with it.
I think that history already showed that MS underestimated the power of the community and their ability to enforce standards over proprietary solutions.
There is several talks about the issue in general on YUI theater, which I would highly recommend also for those interested.

By: Andy

Andy — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 03:30:32 +0000

At this point, the platform, the web browser, should be responding to the (developer) market, not the other way around. They should be saying/thinking “what do you want?” or “how can we make things easier?” and delivering on that.

By: Schill

Schill — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 01:37:30 +0000

This is good stuff straight from the team at MS, I think a lot of the practices are relevant to javascript in general and not specifically just IE’s JScript engine. I also recommend Julien’s presentation as well – all good stuff.

By: Marc

Marc — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:14:54 +0000

That Ajax View thingy crashes IE6… but still pretty neat though…

By: Morgan Roderick

Morgan Roderick — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:12:06 +0000

This looks very much like last years “recommendations” from the IE team, about not using closures etc. Basically: “gimp your script to accomodate our browser” … after a few years of supporting various generations of IE, you get kind of an ambivalent attitude towards the IE team(s) at MS.

On one hand, they do great work, and I personally can’t wait to play around with an IE version, that can pass the Acid2 test.

On the other hand, the sheer arrogance of some of these guys is just staggering. They keep churning out mediocre code, and expect the rest of the worlds (web)developers to jump through hoops to continue to support the clueless masses that choose IE because someone decides to cash in on their desktop dominance.

By: khakman

khakman — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 20:55:25 +0000

In addition the use of XSLT can deliver huge performance boosts to HTML generation and rendering over JavaScript. TIBCO General Interface uses a technique to poke values from JavaScript objects into parameters in XSLT (so developers do not have to get into the yuck of XSLT development), then use XSLT/XML merge to generate and update GUIs faster. Essentially the XML/XSL merge process acts as a sort of compiler for these processes and gets the job done faster. It’s one the the things that makes TIBCO GI (after it loads — which does take a second or two more given all that’s in it to deliver full featured ajax apps — not a component or three in an HTML page) run so fast. Of course this means that your data must be in XML, but GI’s data objects can be accessed as both JSON or XML simultaneously.