Professional iPhone™ and iPod® touch Programming: Building Applications for Mobile Safari™

Chapter 9. Bandwidth and Performance Optimizations

Once Apple made the strategic decision to support Web-based applications for iPhone and iPod touch rather than native applications, optimization emerged as a front burner issue for application developers. With native applications, programmers can code in their personal style, efficient or not, because the actual performance hit is negligible, even on a mobile device like iPhone. What's more, in a decade where broadband is now the norm, many Web developers have fallen into those same tendencies and allow their sites and applications to be composed of ill-formed HTML, massive JavaScript libraries, and multiple CSS style sheets.

However, when you are developing applications for iPhone and iPod touch, you need to refocus your programming and development efforts toward optimization and efficiency. What makes it different from normal Web 2.0 apps is that the developer can no longer rely on the fact that the user is accessing the application from a broadband connection. iPhone users may be coming to your application using Wi-Fi or a much slower EDGE connection.

Therefore, as you develop your applications, you will want to formulate an optimization strategy that makes the most sense for your context. You'll want to think about both bandwidth and code performance optimizations.

Your Optimization Strategy

If you spend much time at all researching optimization strategy and techniques, you quickly discover that there are two main schools of thought. ...