Networking Meeting Summary for Transition from Flash to DHTML UI

Summary
Notes

Summary

The meeting was primarily just networking and a roll-out of a blist alpha site (http://alpha.blist.com/) transitioning the UI from Flash to DHTML.

From my initial review I couldn't tell elements of the alpha had been migrated but there are several items of interest (though unlikely to be directly applicable at at Classmates):

Notes

Third-party hosting

http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/

  <script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript">
    google.load("jquery", "1.3.2");
  </script>

A future project could be migrating our loading of jQuery and jQuery UI over to Google¹ or Yahoo.

jQuery with plugins

Neither of the following looked relevant and the sizing feature may be duplicated in 1.3.2:

JSizes²: jQuery extension plugin for CSS properties
cookies³: Object Oriented Javascript Cookie Handling Library with jQuery bindings

Central loader with namespacing

They've used a simple model for incorporating the JavaScript:

Use the CDN for loading external libraries
Use a relatively small core file⁴ in the header for namespace
Use a larger shared file⁵ for the site

Using a similar system at Classmates would require setting an appropriate balance between the cost of the http request in the head (including cookies) against the impact on page rendering.

A future project could be to use the following load system:

<head>: Load third-party loader
<head>: Load core global functions (namespace, OAS)
footer: Load secondary global functions and site initialization functions (init()) and concatenated global plugins
footer: Load application functions
footer: Load feature functions
footer: Load page functions

This would likely require a review of whether concatenating 3 - 6 request would have any performance benefit.