I also attended a presentation on Web Compatibility and Performance Testing given by Imad Mouline and Ryan Breen of Gomez Inc. This was a good presentation on evaluating browser speeds. Not surprised to see that Google Chrome and Apple Safari showed the fastest browser times and that IE and Firefox were the slowest. This session also covered topics such as time to first byte and domain sharding.

Just after lunch I hit the vendor session IE8 given by Chris Bowen. This was a quick session by nature (all the vendor tech sessions were only a half hour). Chirs did a good job of showing the new developer tools in IE8. Two things I was glad to see is that the developer tools are finally on par with those offered by Firebug and that IE8 can emulate IE7.

The highlight on the second day for my money was Object Oriented CSS given by Nicole Sullivan.  The presentation offered a shift away from how I normally think of CSS (styling by element) to focusing on styling by class. The benfit being smaller more managable CSS files and fewer defined styles.

• Avoid Styling by location.
• Define defaults.
• If two styles are so close (aka heading 3 and heading 4 should have more of a difference then 1 pixel) then throw one out and only use one.
• When adding classes to a style you may not know what one will take precedence.
• Slideshow

The final presentation of the day that I attended was on JavaScript patterns given by Stoyan Stefanov. This presentation quickly covered JavaScript patterns and anti-patterns. His website pretty much summed up his presentation. Also, here is the slideshow.

First, you’ll need to go out and add a JavaScript extension library to your Selenium IDE to support the while loop. You can find the JavaScript file and a ‘how-to’ here:

http://51elliot.blogspot.com/2008/02/selenium-ide-goto.html

Second, write your test script.  My test is just a quick simple script that will: iterate through a JavaScript array of Twitter account names, log to the Selenium IDE console the account name, open up that account’s Twitter page, and select each accounts following link. The script isn’t very elaborate, but you get the point.

You’ll notice (see below) that the script generously uses the getEval command provided by the Selenium IDE. This command tells the IDE to execute the JavaScript provided in the Target field. I also use the javascript{} notation in the Target field to get at my defined variables.

Here’s a screenshot of what my test looks like in the Selenium IDE:

While Loop In Selenium

There are certainly other  Selenium commands that could have been used here to accomplish the same thing. Besides the getEval command the Selenium IDE supports a store command for storing variables as well as some short cut notation for getting at those variables. There is also a runScript command that works similar to the getEval command. You’ll need to research those on your own and decide what works best for you.

The Future of Ajax: highlights

• canvas – html 5.0 element for drawing graphics and creating animations when combined with JavaScript. Not supported in all browsers yet. After the conference I found this tutorial from Mozilla.
• Bespin - online code editor that makes use of canvas and JavaScript. Very, very cool! I think this really shows off what’s possible.
• Using the web to extend plugins with: Google Gears, Fluid, Mozilla Prism, and JetPack.

For me the highlight of the day had to be the presentation by Steve Sounders on Even Faster Web Sites. Steve covered best practices for speeding up the loading of web pages along with several tools to help web developers evaluate and correct page load problems. Here are my notes from this presentation:

• Up to 80% of page loading time is spent on the front end and not the back end of the application. If back end processing is longer than this then either the server side code is bad or infrastructure has problems.
• Tools for tracking web page load speeds include: YSlow and Google Page Speed. Both are Firebug plugins.
• Some tips for increasing load times are: compress JavaScript files with gzip, move script tags to bottom of html page, and load JavaScript in parallel (all other elements on page will wait until external scrips are loaded).

This conference didn’t disappoint. There, of course, was a large emphasis (to name a few) on user experience, ajax, javascript, Json, and mobile phone development.

I’ve now posted all three of my day by day impressions. These are really just a rambling of notes and links, but I felt it was important to post this stuff. Mainly so I don’t lose it.

Overall Conference Rating (4.5 out of 5.0)
Speakers: 4.5
Sessions: 4.5
Location: 4.5

Conference Links
Conference: http://ajaxexperience.techtarget.com/conference/index.html
Slide shows: http://www.slideshare.net/ajaxexperience2009/slideshows

The application I’m creating is task list app, which is mostly based on an Access Database (booo) that a civil engineering friend had put together. I’ve decided to go straight Java standards and I’m not bringing in any web server frameworks (Struts, JSF, etc.). I’m not sure if any of those frameworks will even work properly with the AppEngine.  The application I’m writing should be fairly simple and Servlets and Jsps should be all I need. I will need a lot JavaScript so I have brought in prototype.js along with the script.aculo.us effects library.

> python manage.py runserver 8080

Activation context generation failed for “C:\Python\DLLs\_socket.pyd”.Error in manifest or policy file “C:\Python\DLLs\Microsoft.VC90.CRT.MANIFEST” on line 12. The value “../msvcr90.dll” of attribute “name” in element “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1^file” is invalid.

I found the issue had to do with how the MANIFEST file, listed above, was trying to reference the msvcr90.dll file. It appears the reference was correct ‘../msvcr90.dll’, but for some reason it wasn’t finding the file, which was up one directory. As you can see from the above path the MANIFEST file lives in the Python DLLs directory. The msvcr90.dll lives in the Python root directory.

A slightly confusing side note is that a MANIFEST file with the same name also exists in the root Python directory. I’m too new to Python to know if perhaps the wrong MANIFEST file is being used or why this file would exisit in both spots.

After some failed attempts of hacking around the issue I finally caved and updated the MANIFEST file in the DLLs directory to point simply at ‘msvcr90.dll’ rather than ‘../msvcr90.dll’. Then I copied the msvcr90.dll file from the my root Python directory into the DLLs diretory where the MANIFEST file lived. That corrected the issue.

Along with Python I’ve been poking around on the Django web framework site. I also found this site helpful. As with the Python site it’s a great resource for tutorials, documentation, and links to Django focused bloggers. Everything I need in one spot. Thank you!

Once I get through the tutorials it’ll be time to write an actual application. I’m trying to come up with a test application that I can write in each programming language that I know. Yes, just to show off a bit. But, I’m stating with Python. The coolest part is that I don’t need to pay to host a Python application. I’ve been checking out the Google App Engine. What will Google come up with next. I’ve gone out and brought in the code locally and have had no issue getting their tutoral ‘guest book’ application up and running. Pretty sweet.

Look at the ads themselves. The one of seen most often is Mac ripping on Vista, while taking a shot at Microsoft’s ad budget. So, I’m watching a Mac ad that is ripping on ad budgets. Please!!!! I think the creative people hired by Mac have been watching to many political ads lately. And getting back to the ad budget rip … try watching a single television show where Mac computers are not jammed down your throat in product placement.

Believe it or not I’m a Apple / Mac fan. I think they make great products with excellent user interfaces. But, don’t try to sell me a new operating system that is basically just an upgrade to your previous system. I’m still waiting for OS X Liger to be released. And I like how Mac has conveniently forgotten that some of their core people, albeit stupid people, that didn’t want to switch from OS 9 to OS X. Whenever their is a drastic change in operating systems people want to push back. Maybe that is why some windows users don’t like Vista. It’s a core change. Personally, people I’ve talked to have had very few issues in it.

Anyway. I’m done for now. But, please stop playing the ads. Come up with something new.

Thanks.

1. Update your dispatch.fcgi file. There are a couple of additions you can make to the dispatch.fcgi file that will help improve the performance of your application. I highly recommend implementing the pfrao handler that was put together by Chris Gaskett with the following changes: First, I prefer to keep two fcgi processes alive (for complex applications). See my dispatch.fcgi code below. Second, help manage your server resources by changing the line in the dispatch.fcgi file that reads: RailsFCGIHandler.process! to be: RailsFCGIHandler.process! nil, 50

Here is my complete dispatch.fcgi file:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../config/environment"
require 'fcgi_handler'

class RailsFCGIHandler
  private
    # improved version of frao_handler by Chris Gaskett chris.gaskett.com
    # tries to keep two fcgi process alive
    # still might need a kill -9 sometimes if processes hangs
    def pfrao_handler(signal)
      dispatcher_log :info, "asked to terminate immediately"
      number_procs = `/bin/ps ux | /bin/grep -c fcgi$`.to_i
      # note: to_i produces 0 if conversion to integer is not successful
      case number_procs
      when 0
        dispatcher_log :info, "pfrao handler error, check number_procs query, paths. Exiting"
        exit
      when 1...2
        dispatcher_log :info, "pfrao handler restarting instead, only two process left"
        restart_handler(signal)
      else
        dispatcher_log :info, "pfrao handler agreed to exit, more than one process is running"
        exit
      end
    end
    alias_method :exit_now_handler, :pfrao_handler
end

RailsFCGIHandler.process! nil, 50

2. Manage application fcgi processes using cron jobs. I’m not going to get into a lot of detail of managing cron jobs here, however, if you’re on Site5 you can manage cron jobs through their SiteAdmin Advanced Web Tools.

There are two cron jobs I would recommend. The first will kill all fcgi processes nightly (at a non peak time). This ensures that any rouge processes are properly killed. Here’s a sample of what this cron job would look like on Site5 (replace username with your username): pkill -9 -u username -f dispatch.fcgi.

The second cron job you MAY want to implement is to have the oldest fcgi process killed every few hours. This makes the assumption that the oldest process is a rouge process and runs the risk of killing a good process. I have found the performance loss of an unresponsive rouge process to be greater than that of killing a good process. But, opinion’s vary on how to handle this situation. The cron job would look something like (replace username with your username): : pkill -o -u username -f dispatch.fcgi.

References

• pfrao
• Optimize Rails Resources
• I don’t necessarily think Site5 is awesome, but this is a good post