An Asset Management System for Lasso Powered Sites

Jason — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:45:42 +0000

At the 2008 Lasso Developer Conference in Chicago, I presented a paper entitled Server Side Techniques for Client Side Optimization, in which I reviewed the original 13 Rules For Making Web Sites Fast from Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance Team. These rules quickly became the seminal document on the topic of client side optimization and have since been expanded to include (at the time of this writing) 37 rules across 7 categories. They also became the basis for the performance tests used by the YSlow add-on for Firebug, which is a great tool for evaluating the performance of your site.

The second half of my presentation described an asset management system for Lasso which manages the JavaScript and CSS files used throughout the site, automating many of the aforementioned best practices by handling the concatenation, minification (via YUI Compressor), compression, caching, and integration of JavaScript and CSS files. The system is designed to be adaptable to any Lasso framework or codebase without substantially impacting existing workflows, and can easily be partially or completely disabled for debugging purposes.

Even though some of the convenience features of the system are relatively fresh code, and suffer from at least one minor bug (discovered while helping Tami Williams integrate the system into the LassoFuseBox framework), the core components of this system have now been deployed several times over in production sites and work beautifully together. The following graph displays the average savings in response time, bytes transferred, and total number of requests from one of my code samples:

Video of my presentation (as well as the others) should be available in the near future. In the meantime, now that the conference is over, I am making my paper, code samples, and slides available for download:

Documentation for the individual tags that make up the system is available at tagSwap.net. Be sure to check there for any future updates and/or bug fixes.

The slides can be viewed (and downloaded) via SlideShare:

Client Side Optimization Techniques

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: ldc2008 ldc08)

Lasso Developer Conference 2008

Jason — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:44:10 +0000

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been preparing for this year’s Lasso Developer Conference in Chicago. It’s my second time speaking at the event, and although it’s not until September, a written paper and demo materials which will accompany the presentation ~~were due July 1st~~ are due July 14th (thanks to LassoSoft for the gracious extension). I’m really looking forward to the event. It’s truly a great chance to meet and interact with members of the Lasso community as well as the LassoSoft team.

The title of my talk is “Server Side Techniques for Client Side Optimization”, and it explores ways to streamline the delivery of modern web apps by reducing HTTP requests, combining, minifying, and compressing assets with tools such as the YUI Compressor, using asset subdomains, and more, all wrapped up in a self-contained system that won’t force you to change your existing workflow. And, although I agree somewhat with criticisms that it’s “teaching to the test”, it’ll also help you score an A(100) in YSlow.

Wheel 2.0: Jason Huck's Devblog » optimization

An Asset Management System for Lasso Powered Sites

Lasso Developer Conference 2008