Software As She’s Developed

The fourth and final podcast in this series of Ajax Programming Patterns. As always, the patterns are online at AjaxPatterns.org and covered in the book too, now available at Amazon. This 33-minute podcast covers seven patterns of Performance Optimisation:

• Browser-Side Cache Maintain a local cache of information.
• Guesstimate Instead of grabbing real data from the server, make a guesstimate that’s good enough for most user’s needs. ITunes Download Counter, GMail Storage Counter.
• Multi-Stage Download Quickly download the page structure with a standard request, then populate it with further requests.
• Predictive Fetch Anticipate likely user actions and pre-load the required data.
• Fat Client Create a rich, browser-based, client by peforming remote calls only when there is no way to achieve the same effect in the browser.
• Pseudo-Threading Use a timer and a worker queue to process jobs without the blocking application flow.
• Code Compression Compress code on the server, preferably not on the fly.

(Note that the last two are recent additions to the wiki and just stubs at this stage.)

Okay, here endeth the series. I will soon be starting up a new series on the next group of patterns (Part 5 in the book): Functionality and Usability Patterns. There will be a change in the format, one I hope you’ll enjoy!