I’ve neglected this blog lately. My only excuse is that I am very, very busy! Not only have I been lucky enough to land a great opportunity working with some very bright jQuery Interactive Developers at Molecular, but I’ve also been working on something really big. (More on that later!)
But despite being busy, I felt compelled to post this one. As part of the something really big project, I had to deduplicate a potentially large array of nodes. Dojo doesn’t have a built-in function for deduplication (a.k.a “deduping”). How could it not? Doesn’t everybody have to do this once in a while?
I guess I’ll have to write one. How hard could it be?
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Javascript, dojo, jQuery, performance
This should really be Tip #1 since it’s the most critical of all. Let me just say this as clearly as possible:
Your fastest Javascript projects are the ones that have the least Javascript!
Sure, Javascript engines have matured. Safari’s Nitro, Chrome’s V8, Firefox’s TraceMonkey, and Opera’s Carackan all kick some serious butt. (IE8’s JScript, unfortunately, still sucks wind.) However, routines written in C++ still run orders of magnitude faster in most cases.
Don’t write Javascript to do something your browser already does at compiled-code speeds.
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Javascript, dojo, performance
Back in 2006, I was the lead front-end architect for a mission-critical Web 2.0 application. Yah-yah, aren’t they all mission-critical? Yes, but this one really was critical since it was one of those make-or-break moments for the product. What made this project really interesting were the unrealistic expectations the product managers had of web apps.
Sometimes, pressure like this can lead to creativity and innovation. On this occasion, it helped me reach back in to my electrical engineering coursework to apply a hardware concept to software programming.
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Event Handling, Javascript, dojo
