Archive for September, 2010

jQuery and Drupal

So I’ve decided to write an article for all the Drupal webmasters. If you never heared of Drupal, well Drupal is a free and open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP . It is used worldwide, ranging from personal blogs to large corporate and political sites including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk.

Important: A very useful Drupal php function is drupal_add_js(), with this function we can include a javascript file in the head section of the html output.

jQuery can be used when developing functionalities under the Drupal CMS because jQuery is part of the Drupal core since Drupal 5.
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Speeding Up Your Web Site

I decided to write a different topic article, about performance techniques, just to keep things interesting. So this article will not be about jQuery especially but a general tutorial about how to improve your web site performance ( a thing that I found is very important).  I will try to make a list will all the best practices when it comes to web page optimization.

1.Minify javascript and css
The performance of a web page can be increased if the javascript and css is compressed.When code is minified comments are removed, white spaces, and in case of javascript a base64_encode can also be used.The resulting file will decrease in size. Tools that can be used are JSMin and YUI Compressor.Also a lot of free tools can be found on the internet.These is how a compressed js code will look like:

  1. eval(function(p,a,c,k,e,r){e=String;if(!''.replace(/^/,String)){while(c–)r[c]=k[c]||c;k=[function(e){return r[e]}];e=function(){return'\\w+'};c=1};while(c–)if(k[c])p=p.replace(new RegExp('\\b'+e(c)+'\\b','g'),k[c]);return p}('1 2(3,0){4("5.6 = 7;",0)}',8,8,'b|function|timedRedirect|a|setTimeout|location|href|redirectTo'.split('|'),0,{}))

2. Flush the head
When a request is made, the browser has to wait for the html content to be received from the server before it can start retriving js files, css files , images, etc. So a good practice is to flush the head part of the html before so the browser can start retrieving the js,css files.

  1.  
  2. < ?php flush(); ?>
  3. <body>
  4. </body>

3. Split Components Across Domains
By splitting you can maximize parallel downloads. By standard a browser will not make more then 2 request at a time, so if you have 10 images on a page it will get the first 2, then the next 2 and so on.By splitting on multiple domains you will resolve this issue. Make sure you’re using not more than 2-4 domains because of the DNS lookup penalty. As an example, you can host your main html/dynamic content on www.using-jquery.com and move static components(images,css files, js files) on static1.using-jquery.com and static2.using-jquery.com

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