Functionality : I want to capture the twitter handle of a user on a form. Most users will enthusiastically enter the entire URL like http://twitter.com/itsmeritesh, some will leave out the http:// and enter the rest. I wanted to validate that the username was a single word, didn’t contain parts of a URL (mainly slashes) and didn’t mind it being empty.

 // HTML Code
// <form name="myform"> 
// <input type="text" id="twitterUrl"> <label for="twitterUrl" />
 
function isEmpty(Val)
	{
	    if(Val.length==0) return true;
	      for(var i=0; i< Val.length; i++)
	      {
	            if( " \t\n".indexOf( Val.charAt(i)) == -1 ) 
	            return false;
	      }
	       return true;
	}
 
 jQuery.validator.addMethod("handleOnly", function(value) {
		 if(isEmpty(value)) return true;
 
		 if ((value.split(" ").length == 1) && (value.search('/')==-1))
			  return true;
		 else
			 return false;	  
	}, "Please specify only one word");
 
$(document).ready(function(){
    $("#myform").validate({
    	rules: {		
    		twitterUrl : {  handleOnly: true }
                 }
      messages: {
		twitterUrl: { handleOnly : "Only your twitter handle " }
               }
         }); 
  });

handleOnly is a new extension written by using the jQuery.validator.addMethod() method. The rule then specifies whether the return from the function must be true or false, in my case its true. The message is displayed when the condition is not met by the value.

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javascript:
   if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Safari')%20>=%200)
    {
         Q=getSelection();
   }else{
    Q=document.selection?document.selection.createRange().text:document.getSelection();
  }
   location.href='http://wordpress.php?username=blah&text='+encodeURIComponent(Q)+'&popupurl='+encodeURIComponent(location.href);

You will see that this is calling a RESTful implementation of some service with query parameters and the whole code is stored and rendered from inside the bookmarklet. Lets leave the security aspects of this implementation aside, that will require another post in itself. Such a bookmark is a nightmare waiting to happen. Imagine the trouble you would face if you changed the implementation tomorrow. You will have to write to ensure backward compatibility or take the user to a page where he/she can upgrade to the newest version of the bookmarklet. This is a bad way of delivering software.

Ideally, the bookmarklet in accordance with a shortcut/bookmark must mainly be a pointer to the actual web resource. Even for trivial bookmarklets, make sure you follow this design principle because you might want to do something different or more advanced later on. I am sure you have come across situations where you realized the bookmarklet you wrote didn’t work on a browser like Opera or Safari. It may be too late to correct it later on if people have already installed it on their browsers.

Lets now take a bookmarklet that loads the code to be executed from a script on the web. This is now the preferred means of deploying bookmarklets as it puts the control back into the hands of the web developer. This example is from the Friendfeed bookmarklet that lets you share things on FriendFeed.

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 javascript:void((function()
  {
    var%20e=document.createElement('script');
    e.setAttribute('type','text/javascript');
    e.setAttribute('src','http://someserver.com/bookmarkletcode.js');
   document.body.appendChild(e)
  })())

All this bookmarklet does is to append a new script tag in your html page and assigns the source to the bookmarklet source. The difference now is that there is no code on the client side that is tied to an implementation. You can change the code in the bookmarkletcode.js as and when you feel necessary and be assured that the people using your bookmarklet will always use the latest version.

Give me your inputs as to what should go into a resume and what shouldn’t. If this turns out to be a good discussion, I am sure it will help out a lot of people like me.

Update: After receiving some feedback about my own resume, I am adding some more tips.

• Even if you don’t believe that technology matters ( like I do), you have to put technologies that you know in your resume. This is required as the HR’s who look at the resume’s usually filter out resumes based on skills mentioned. Not having the skills column is only going to get your resume away from good opportunities.
• Its very important that you provide your contact information in multiple forms. Phone number, at least two email id’s, home phone etc.
• Nobody cares that you won a first prize in your school’s annual dancing competition or that you have helped organize your college fest. A recruiter told me that such things are good only if you are applying for BPO jobs where you have to prove your leadership skills.
• Do not write essays about your projects. Leave it short and let the recruiters/interviewers quiz you about the same. This gives more time for conversation and a healthy dialogue.

I was supposed to be involved in a discussion about cloud computing at Cloudcamp Bangalore, but due to other commitments, I could not attend the event. I had a small writeup about the limitations and challenges in Application clouds. Here is the full text of it.

Cloud Computing is a way of providing dynamically scalable and available resources such as computation, storage etc as a service to users who can use it to deploy their applications and data. Cloud Computing can handle data in both the public and the private domain. But this seemingly harmless way of thinking about building applications has its own set of issues.I am primarily referring to application cloud providers, the kind where you deploy your applications. Not storage and service clouds. Google AppEngine would be a good example for the cloud that I am describing. I note some of them here :

From the Users perspective:

1. New unstructured and non standard paradigm of programming: Each cloud has its own supported programming language and syntax requirements for programming, though most of these clouds expose the typical hashtable based cache and datastore interfaces. There is an urgent need for standardization of interfaces and methods of programming them. One of the reasons why shared hosting environments work great is because , as a programmer, I know that I can move my PHP/PERL code to another server and it will work without too much of a fuss. Moving from one of the dozen odd cloud providers to another requires considerable developmental efforts, not to forget time (for businesses, this could spell doom).  A look back at history shows languages like SQL, C etc being standardized to stop exactly this sort of undesirable proliferation.
2. Restrictions on the programming model : For cloud based applications to be highly available, they must be easy to dynamically mirror on multiple machines. Once these applications are mirrored, they can be served on demand by load balancing servers which makes them highly available and the user doesn’t face delays in being serviced. This is an old trick used by busy websites from the early days of web publishing but these solutions were custom built for websites. So, extending this concept to cloud based platforms, servicing thousands of applications, mandates the platform providers to automate this task of replication and mirroring. This job is easier said than done. This process can be made seamless when the program stores as little state information as possible. By state, I mean transactional variables, static variables, variables in the context of the entire application etc. These things are almost a given in traditional programming environments but are very hard to come by in cloud based environments. The unnatural way of dealing with this situation is using the datastore or the cache to store state of an application. There are a lot of restrictions like lack of privileges to install third party libraries, no access to file system to write files etc ( which forces you to use the datastore and pay for it)
3. A good local debugging experience: A good local development environment, debugging experience is a must for programming on the cloud. Most cloud providers do not provide good local development environments. There is also a lack of good IDE’s that can help with programming and debugging programs written for the cloud. The providers that do provide a local debug experience, do not simulate real cloud like conditions. Both from my personal experience and from conversations with other developers, I have come to realize that most people face problems when moving code from their local development servers to the actual cloud. This is only due to inconsistencies in the behavior of the local dev env compared to the cloud.
4. Appropriate metrics and documentation of programming best practices : On a cloud, since a user pays for almost every CPU cycle, appropriate metrics on usage of processing time and memory must be presented to the users. Typically a profile of the application with function names and their corresponding time taken, memory used, processing cycles used will definitely help the developer tune his/her code to optimize on usage of processing power. The best solution for this is for cloud providers to abstract common code patterns into optimal libraries so that the users can be assured that they are running the most optimal code for a certain operation. An example of this is Apache PIG, which gives a scripting like interface to Apache Hadoop’s HDFS for data analysis. Also, Most cloud providers do not provide enough statistics and also profiling capabilities.

From the providers perspective:

Here I look at challenges that cloud providers have to face:

1. Ensuring availability of the cloud: This proves to be crucial as Clouds host critical business applications, for whom, downtime would mean monetary losses. Effective monitoring and load balancing solutions are to be built. Most clouds employ virtualization technology to get the most out of any resource. In such cases, tools should be written to figure out a resource hog early and move the application to a more powerful grid or a machine, so that the other users get their share of the cloud without delays.
2. Ensuring Consistency: Both the data and code is replicated on the cloud and maintaining consistency of data is extremely crucial. This is the reason why most transactional updates are not allowed on the cloud. Example: sequence objects, which are almost a given in traditional databases are not provided, probably because maintaining state across machines for such statements is non trivial. Problems like distributed updates, locking, partitioning, sharding etc  arise when dealing with data. Such constructs are to be provided to the users as most of it is given in the non cloud deployment space.
   Most datastores provided by cloud vendors (except the ones that provide cloud based database services) do not support relational models. Which means all object relations have to be programmatically established. This could always lead to bad code, unnecessary joins, cascading problems and tons of other problems that developers faced before working with relational datastores.
3. Program verification : One of the biggest worries about deploying applications on the cloud is the correctness of the program in execution. Erroneous conditions, like infinite loops, can not only put the machine at the risk of being overloaded and unavailable, but also cost the user a significant amount of money. Tools like static analysis should be used to analyze code uploaded on the cloud and it should be checked for infinite loops, possible race conditions,  null references, unreachable code etc. The code uploaded should also be optimized or suggestions should be provided to the users about how they could optimize code to best utilize the available resources.

Conclusion : The cloud should become a complete nonrestrictive platform for applications. There should be no restrictions on the constructs, functionality and privileges on the cloud. Also, it should be dead simple to move everyday applications onto the cloud without too much of rework. This could mean writing migration utilities, import/export options and other artifacts that make the transition to a cloud much easier.  This will prove essential as most live applications, at least currently, do not run on a cloud and helping them migrate easily will mean more revenue and adoption.

I used friendfeed because I wanted to start a conversation based on the items I shared. But, again like all social media sites, my ability to get the conversation started depended directly on the number of people who were using friendfeed. So, I sat down to fix the problem myself and after one nights work, Moffe was born.

For the unitiated moffe stands for My Own FriendFeed Emulator. It gives the same features that friendfeed provides and also provides an easy way for people to leave comments on the items I share. Plus, the link that I shared, is federated directly into the page. The outcome is that now people can leave comments on items I share plus see the page all with one click. I have also incorporated canned comments for that restless user who doesn’t have time to write in comments. Plus, I get to monitor moffe on this cool dashboard.

In essence, its a microsharing service which lets me keep my content on my site and not rely on other services like friendfeed ,twitblogs etc. Thanks to Easy on the Slaw for giving me the twitter wrapper in PHP.

/* Get the latest 10 photos from flickr where the photo name contains cat */
SELECT * FROM flickr.photos.search WHERE text='Cat' LIMIT 10

As you can clearly see the language makes querying a service and receiving its response really really simple. This is how most new psuedo languages are. They work with service end points and emulate an existing programming language’s syntax to do that. These languages are built with mashup’s in mind. The dangers of such an offering are already imminent. Services are good as long as they are up and live.   Take for example any of the Google or yahoo  Api’s and you will find wrappers written by people in such pseudo langauges to make your life simple. Even in the enterprise space there are such languages being built which query custom services and makes building applications really really simple.

Another observation of mine involves loose typing in these languages. Most new languages are loosely typed. Most of them take from python which lets the user take care of the typing. SQL by far has been the most emulated language amongst these pseudo langauges. Take for example JoSql to add SQL like capabilities to operations like file handling or Linq in .NET which exposes a sql like interface to datastructures. These improvisations have dramatically reduced time to turn ideas into code and rapidly prototype the application.

There are limitations to using such improvisations; some that even I can vouch for. Loosely typed and unstructured languages are good as long as you are not working on large scale systems. If you are hacking up a solution to a problem that you are facing, these pseudo languages look to be real problem solvers but when it comes to working in teams, projects that need to go into production, you start getting into big problems. Though I am a python fanboy, I faced problems when I was working on python and perl on a large project with a team. Interfaces would be unclear, poor documentation would literally spell doom and tons of other problems that we never thought we would face. There are others who complain of the very same thing. I am guessing we will see a flood of such languages in the future thanks largely to applications evolving slowly into services and it will be difficult to guage the quality of these services. Twitter’s API tried to make their service more stable but the mechanism they chose didn’t satisfy many developers.  Lets hope we figure out a way to make these more reliable and stable. I guess its the developers call to be judicious about what language and service to choose when building applications.

First and fore most you need to to get Wordpress. Wait for 2.7, its awesome, with Quickiepress and customizable screens, blogging will never be the same again. If you dont own your own site, then get a wordpress subdomain. Though such a step will mean you wont be able to use most of what I write about next. Good, now lets get some plugins :

1. Akismet : I think this is shipped with wordpress by default but is seriously one plugin that you need. Its stopped nearly 50,000 spam comments.

2. Adsense- deluxe : Manage ads in your Wordpress posts by using simple shortcuts to insert different types of ads. Really useful for people displaying ads ( multiple ads ) on a post.

3. Comment-email-responder : This plugin lets the author reply to a comment via mail if the user has provided his/her mail id. Its useful as it drives the discussion forward and also is a way to bring people back for a good discussion.

4. Syntax highlighter : Syntax highlighter is an awesome plugin for developers. Most developers end up writing some code on their blogs and lets admit it, code is not so elegantly displayed on most blogging engines. Syntax highlighter make code look really pretty on you blog. It supports C++ (cpp, c, c++), C# (c#, c-sharp, csharp), CSS (css), Delphi (delphi, pascal), Java (java), Java Script (js, jscript, javascript), PHP (php) Python (py, python), Ruby (rb, ruby, rails, ror), Sql (sql),VB (vb, vb.net),XML/HTML (xml, html, xhtml, xslt). Take a look at this section of code.

 # python's functional programming support is awesome
 # you can use three functions map, reduce and filter

 # map(function, sequence) calls function(item) for each of the sequence's items
 #returns a list of the return values

  >>> map(lambda x: x*x*x, range(1, 11))
  [1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512, 729, 1000]

 #reduce(function, sequence) returns a single value by performing tree based reduction on f(item)
 #For example, to compute the sum of the numbers 1 through 10: 

 >>> reduce(lambda x, y: x+y, range(1, 11))
  55

5. Google-Analytics plugin : This plugin lets you put your adsense code in a single place without having to edit any of the files. If you are using analytics for your blog then get this plugin, makes the job hasslefree.

6. Subscribe to comments: I subscribe to comments feed for a post when I am interested in a discussion, but for users who dont want to take the pain of managing rss, you can give them an option to follow further comments by email. Its great to drive a good discussion again.

Well thats about it, have fun blogging!!

Also, people who are using rails 2.0, please go the 2.0 section directly. If you start using 1.0 tutorial, you may get lost after a certain time and the results wont show. Check what version of rails you have installed and then use the corresponding section. Best of luck!!

Tags: rubyon rails, ror, rails, itsmeritesh

BOSS is simple. Really really simple and can do wonders if you are planning to build a search engine with your own flavor. Unlike other searches, BOSS gives you XML/JSON, meaning you can re-order results and present them in any way you like. Add flash, css, javascript, canvas elements whatever to build that unique search experience. After the cuil ripoff Yuil, which got taken down and was relaunched again as 4Hoursearch (why did they call it that ? figure it out Einstein !!), I was sure BOSS would be easy, but didn’t know it would be this easy.

Its only recently that I started learning Python, and I suck at it, so I picked my old favorite PHP as the language of choice ( I suck at PHP too, but suck less compared to Python). Got myself an Application ID to use BOSS. Used PHP SimpleXML parser to get a URL of choice and Voila, I had my results in an array. Wrote some really rudimentary CSS to match the aesthetics of my site and my site search was done .

Check out my Yahoo BOSS powered site search here !!

If it wasn’t for my crappy PHP skill level, Im sure I could have wrapped up the entire thing, right from “Duh, what is BOSS ?” to the implementation, in under an hour. If I do find more time to kill whilst I wait for dinner, I shall experiment with different displays for search results from BOSS. Y! BOSS is truly open and in keeping with the Open Source spirit, I have shared my rudimentary site search code. You wont believe it but the code , with proper convention, HTML and CSS comes up to 65 lines . Isn’t it awesome ??

Get the code for site search here.

Another wonderful manifestation of this concept is that you can now build custom search engines that will search only the sites that you catalog for information you need. Check out Y! BOSS.

Tags: yahoo, BOSS, sitesearch, search

 The reminder service is awesome. Firstly it integrates to my Google as well as my outlook calendar. Next, there is a firefox addon that lets you see your task schedule in gmail. And to top it off I can post events from twitter and also my messenger. Its just truly awesome.
 
The service also understand common sentences and converts it to a date time equivalent. If I write say ” do this day after tomorrow”, it adds do this to two days later. I haven’t yet seen the complete capability of the service, but almost all the english sentences I have typed have ended up in dates. Its pretty clever when you think of it. If you are like me and want to get organized use rtmilk.

Others tools that I use for organizing information around me
1. Outlook and Google Calendar
2. Tagging files in Vista ( not in xp )
3. Personal site search ( which helps me more than it helps others )
4. Post its
5. Reminders on my phone

Tags: rememberthemilk, rtm, organizing, calendar, schedule

 What can ror do ? It makes developing web applications really, and I mean really simple. You give it a table structure and rails automatically builds a table, forms for insert, delete and display for the fields and also build MVC architecture by default. Controllers and views are built and all you have to do as a web developer is to add CSS to the generated files so that they look awesome. There is demo which shows how you can build a blogging engine using rails in under 15 minutes. Now isnt that cool !! Its a really cool hack that has made the job of writing everyday web applications really easy. Well two of my favorite applications online have been built using ror. Check them out .
 
          
 

Well for starters ruby is a programming language – older than java, very english like and mostly interpreted I guess. Rails is this wonderful platform like hack which does a lot of cool things and ruby sits on top of rails and you can build applications using them.

  Installation : I found many places which listed installation instructions but this one worked best.
                    http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsOnUbuntu

 
  This brings me to another wonderful piece of software that runs under 400kb, Gems. A apt styled package manager built to get ruby related software.
Once you are setup, I guess its time to learn the language and to learn ruby, I would definitely suggest why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby. Nothing beats this online book … sorry online masterpiece in explaining the aspects of the ruby language. Im still not done with this but I cant wait to read more of it.

 Since ror is for web development, its obvious you need a webserver, so you can use the prepackaged WEBrick server ( good for small dev). For more serious programming use Mongrel, Apache or lighttpd. Instructions to configure Apache and Lighttpd for ror can be found here. Get MySql for the database and you will be done.

 Lastly you need a very good article to get you started and this is the one that got me started out. Its not perfect considering its almost 2 years old but the errors that show up will help you learn much better. And thats it , we are done. Best of luck learning ror.
 

Tags: ruby, rails , ruby on rails, getting started, tutorials

I have been trying to make a web property OpenId enabled and its a cinch. Just download and install libraries for the multitde of programming languages and then just follow some basic configuration steps , map the OpenId users to your user management system and you are done. Here is a list of all the plugins available for OpenId enabling your site.

OpenId has really come of age and with Yahoo announcing support its become a neccesity for almost every web App. I would even go so far as to mandate websites , old and new , to enable OpenId on their sites and save the users from the painful signup and confirm cycle. The sheer number of OpenId holders should be motivation enough for properties to go the OpenId way.

A recent trip to the Yahoo Developer network portal also showed some glaringly visible tributes to the field of performance. First , there is YSlow, a plugin which works along with firebug and tells you why a website is slow based on certain pre defined parameters. How about an entire section of a site dedicated to performance. Blogs, presentations, talks, podcasts, videos on performance and its related fields. Do you want to know the thirteen rules to speed up your website, then do read this. You are likely to find one of the reasons in this showing up in YSlow.

Also feel free to join the exceptional performance group to discuss more on high performance websites.

People are moving to more open source technologies and are beginning to discard enterprise software. Take for example a migration in my company, people moved from Weblogic to Tomcat, Oracle to MySql and other host of open source technologies. Problem – open source software isn’t usually made with a lot of scalability in mind, unlike enterprise software that is meant to be scaled. So , when this bunch of non scalable software sits on an enterprise bus, you need performance to match if not better the enterprise counterpart. This is where performance tuning comes into play and as more and more open source finds ground in the enterprise, more such challenges with regards to performance have to be addressed.

Comet is essentially an design principle which aims at achieving true push technology using http. Comet is not a technology in itself,  cometd is an implementation effort to make such a paradigm possible, but comet itself isnt a technology. For real time systems and other applications like stock tickers you don’t need an entire page refresh, its enough if you can get the updated values in your respective places. Ajax seemed to be the answer for sometime with browsers asynchronously requesting for changes and then updating the same in DOM. The problem with  Ajax was the polling, since the job was asynchronous, there was a interative pattern of asynchronous requests and replies. Even though there wasn’t any change in the server values, the client would request repeatedly to check if the values changed, which led to the server being overloaded. The solution was to push the updates to a client without the client requesting for it. Sorta like the good old days of socket programming.

There are many solutions to this problem, each one with its own set of advantages and disadvantages but I shall explain a single implementation that I worked on. Its called the Long Looping method.

 Long Looping Method :

This method involves making a request to the server which in itself will reply only when there was a change. Your browser will keep showing you the loading icon coz the server hasn’t replied as yet. The server end can achieve the desired result by either suspending a request to a thread that will wait till notified or a putting the request through an infinite loop. Once there is a change of state on the server the loop ends and the reply sent. The client receives the reply and immediately sends another request for further changes and so on.

In this way you can see that, there is always a low latency http connection between the client browser and the server. The delay in state changes to the server is very low and will definitely be ten orders better than the regular ajax looping method.

Of some of the metrics that I found interesting apart from interestingness , entry points, exits , pageviews , timespent etc I liked the bounce rate very much. Yes bounce rate is the most amazing metric when it comes to the web.

  In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”. – Avinash Kaushik

Sites with good content have very low bounce rates, that coz users stay on the site for longer than just their immediate need. This metric is extremely important to consider as it could lead to some startling discoveries. Bounce rates directly translate to your site’s usability and design. A complicated design often confuses a user and he or she tends to leave a site if the site seems too cluttered ( which is why I hate GoDaddy’s design ). A blank design with no navigational links is also bad. Once the user finishes reading what he/she came to read, you need to coax them to stay longer. Either by giving them sneak peaks of other related articles or any abstract writeup, tags, internal links and so on. For bloggers, please do read this article to make a list of things to lookout for when picking your blogs design.

– Information : People come to your blog for information. Its very depressing if you cannot find what you came looking for. Its also more likely that if they do find what they were looking for, they will stay a little longer on your blog and may even acknowledge your effort with a nice comment. So what should you do ? make sure your content is well placed and is of good typographical quality. Avoid typewriter like fonts, they are old school. Use more rounded fonts that don’t need any anti aliasing. The position of the content is also extremely important. The content must always occupy the majority of the real estate on your blog.

– Load time : Its easy to get carried away with themes that are very glossy looking and also have dynamic refreshes and complex javascript. People!! readers don’t come to your blog for your template, they come there for the information. If I have to wait for 20 seconds to get 4 lines of information , which comes enveloped in about half an MB of images and javascript, then I will be might pissed. Take a subtle theme that is posh to look at and uses as less images as possible. The other problem is that the image based themes look extremely bad if the images don’t load; most of bloggers themes have this problem that none of the images load and you are left with a very ugly looking page which does zilch to visual appeal. Selecting CSS based layouts ensures that page degrades gracefully even if your images give way.

– Delivery : yes this is extremely crucial,which is why I went for a revamp. All things said, I come to your blog for content, so make sure I see it first, the widgets and other sidebar junk can come later. Its easy to get carried away with all the widget goodies available now for blogs, with those flash based embeds and scripts. But these only add to the overhead of your blogs load time. My previous theme had all the widgets on the left and the content on the right, as a result, only after all my content was loaded, my content would appear. A typical reader would have to wait for over half a minute to get a glimpse of what he actually came to read, that too, considering he had a good broadband connection. There were dependencies too- if one of those widgets were to fail , then your content would never load, which is bad. Always make sure your content is the first to load. A simple way to ensure this would be to keep the widgets and other junk on the right hand side of the content, when pages get rendered left to right, the content will appear first.

– Credentials : People like to know the credentials of a blogger while reading. I definitely would trust techcrunch against TechNayak, so its that essential to establish your blogs credentials. Solutions include a map of all your readers, mybloglog widget, stats from your blog and also brief abstract of your blog and you. Most of the times, a future employer will be reading your blog, make sure you get his/her attention. A simple description about you and your blog should just about do the trick.

– More reading material : If people like your writing and want to read more, give them some more material to read. In addition to your article that is already being read, make sure there are some click able links that point to more of your work. Internal links in your post could be a good starting point. Even better would be a related posts section that many blog providers offer, its more likely that people will be interested in reading more about the current subject.

– Feeds and syndication : feeds are growing in popularity and people are busy bookmarking and burning your feeds into their online world. Exemplify your feed URL, make it easy to access and use. There are some themes that don’t even provide RSS urls in the main page, don’t use them. Always make your feed url stand out in the clutter.

– Customize if you can : No theme is perfect , there is always something or the other that will be missing. It could be something as simple as the way your theme addresses people, instead of saying ” Leave a comment ” you may want to say ” Say a word or two ” . Make these customizations where necessary.

In the midst of all this don’t forget to have fun and blogroll. There is nothing sweeter than sharing link love.

Its not so bad in the real world. There are techniques being thought of to reduce the memory footprint of these mamoth js bootstraps. First step would definitely be to use the right library , if you use dojo make sure you use the right flavor of dojo like dojo for ajax or dojo for UI etc. There is no point in having functions bloating if they arent used at all. Next step would be use some brains and filter out unwanted functions in your bootstrap files. Its not that hard I guess, get your self Venkman or the recent firebug and you can be on and reducing in no time.

Now for the real deal:

1. use Dojo Shrink safe to reduce, compress and pack all your js files together. Most of the times your file reduces by almost a third using this. This utility doesnt obfuscate so you can call the same methods and not worry about changing function names.

2. Use Dean Edwards packer to further reduce the size by removing linebreaks and other unwanted characters. This usually reduces the file by another 20%

But make sure you always have a backup of the files. As most of these things are unreversible. These are just performance optimizers, they dont help your programming.

In the worst case, if you still a Kb or two short of your SLA then go ahead and obfuscate your code. Packer does a little bit but there are some really neat ones out there that can do a wonderful job. whats the advantage you ask ? a function OnWindowFocusAndDoubleClick() will get replaced by say g() , now thats improvement.

I found this utility which does reduction, try it out :  jsjuicer 

Click here to view the slideshow.

If you really want to use these libraries, then I suggest Dojo and YUI, both are well documented and have really cool features. You can find the Dojo Documentation here and YUI docs here.