Ajax: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 23. Optimizing Ajax Applications

One of the main appeals of Ajax is that users see it as being faster than traditional web design models. As much as Ajax may increase the speed of your web page or application, however, you can use certain tricks and best practices to further improve speed. None of the suggestions in this chapter are necessary to write a good Ajax-based application. They are intended for developers who want to add that extra edge to their code. If that does not interest you, simply skip this chapter. You won’t hurt my feelings, I promise.

Site Optimization Factors

Unfortunately for you as an Ajax web developer, client-side programming requires planning and real thought when you’re developing code if it is to run optimally for the end user. This is not the case for a desktop application programmer, who does not truly concern himself with optimization. Why is this? For one, when most programming languages are compiled, the compiler optimizes them automatically. The compiler first converts the source code into tokens of keywords, variables, constants, symbols, and logical operators. It then parses these tokens to make sure the source code is written correctly, and it creates an intermediate code that is used in the final process. This process optimizes the intermediate code where it can, and produces a machine language “object” that will be sent to a linker to create the executable file. The desktop application programmer doesn’t really consider any of these compiler ...