Safari® and WebKit Development for iPhone® OS 3.0

Chapter 13. Bandwidth and Performance Optimizations

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 them different from normal Web apps is that the developer can no longer rely on the fact that users are accessing the application from a broadband connection. iPhone users may be coming to your application using Wi-Fi or a slower 3G 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.

Optimization Strategies

If you spend much time at all researching optimization strategies and techniques, you quickly discover two main schools of thought. The first camp is referred to as hyper-optimizers in this book. They will do almost anything to save a byte or an unneeded call to the Web server. They are far more concerned with saving milliseconds than they are about the readability of the code they are optimizing. The second camp, perhaps best described as relaxed optimizers, are interested in optimizing their applications. But they are not interested in sacrificing ...