On Sunday I attended two workshops, High Performance Web pages and then Ruby on Rails. Each workshop offered something different. First off the Yahoo workshop was more of a conference session which was ok with me. I was curious to find out what best practices Yahoo uses in building high performance web pages. They outlined 14 rules listed here:
- 1 Make fewer HTTP requests
- 2 Use a CDN (Content Distribution Network) - such as Akamai, SAVVIS,
Limelight, Mirror Image
- 3 Add an Expires header - for images, stylesheets and scripts
- 4 Gzip components - scripts, stylesheets, XML, set in Apache: mod_gzip
or mod_deflate
- 5 Put CSS at the top
- 6 Move JS (scripts) to the bottom
- 7 Avoid CSS expressions (only in IE - not important)
- 8 Make JS and CSS external - exception might be home page.
- 9 Reduce DNS lookups
- 10 Minify JS - remove white space
- 11 Avoid redirects
- 12 Remove duplicate scripts
- 13 turn off ETags
- 14 make AJAX cacheable and small
http://yuiblog.com/
Also of note was some good material posted on the Yahoo UI Blog.
I give this workshop/session a passing grade in that I found it useful and informative.
In the afternoon I attended the Ruby on Rails workshop. I was really looking forward to this session. And it was geared more as workshop than a session. With the second half being interactive. I'm excited about Ruby and Rails. From the limited amount of time I"ve played with it so far it looks intuitive, fast and scalable for larger applications. A new people search engine, Spock, is built on Ruby and Rails and debut here at the Expo.
Ok now for some gripes. The workshop host David Black was friendly, knowledgeable but his workshop format didn't seem to flow smoothly. If I had not done some prep work on my own I think I would have been totally lost if I was a newbie.
My other gripes this day have to do with the Expo itself. It was a disaster in the making when I went to get my badge. It was disorganized and I had to stand in the mob while someone screamed out names to pickup your badge. I've never seen anything like it any conference I've been to. My next gripe has to do with the workshops. Workshops are generally hands on affairs like the second half of the Ruby on Rails workshop. The problem is that there were no tables to put your computer on to work comfortably and participate in effective way. So I think the O'Reilly organizers need to rethink the workshops, their goals and how their setup.