This Week in JavaScript Performance

This concise, but revealing, paper evaluates ExtJS, Dojo, jQuery, MooTools, Prototype, and YUI on the bases of size, complexity, maintainability, validity, and performance. Tests are conducted, metrics calculated, and issues lightly explored. The number of critical and severe errors in these frameworks startled me.

This article summarizes the lessons learned when trying to improve Bazaar Voice’s performance. This is the first of three articles. It deals with network issues. Parts two and three, when published, will deal with parsing/evaluating and application responsiveness. These experiences stem from writing third party applications that will be used by other developers on other servers, which means not being able to control the environment as well as we might like.

This article very briefly describes page rendering, reflows, and repaints, then points the reader to four exceptional articles that discuss the subject in detail. Tips from the linked articles are summarized at the bottom of this article.

This article explains why certain image formats are not suitable for the Internet. Remember: The image format may be different from what the file name’s extension leads us to believe (e.g., a .jpg file may contain an xbm image).

Stoyan wanted a simple music player that would play the .mp3 when you click on a link of some kind, but without loading a new page and without using Flash. All he wanted was a simple play button beside the link. Now that we have HTML5, it should be an easy thing to do, right? After checking out a couple of prepackaged options, he decided to write the code himself. This article presents and explains his code.

This article demonstrates the lexing, parsing, and evaluating steps of compiler building by creating a tiny text-based calculator in JavaScript. The calculator evaluates basic arithmetic, stores values in variables, and allows function creation/invocation. This project can help the reader gain some insight into the behind-the-scenes activities in JavaScript and most other programming languages. A good introduction to the topic. Lots of code.

As the title says, this 53 minute podcast discusses HTML5’s impending displacement of Flash. Is it going to happen? The panel is not one-sided, so it may be worth a listen.