The importance of having a solid build process Modern web applications are large and complicated pieces of engineering, using many different technologies, sometimes deployed on hundreds (or even thousands) of servers throughout the world, and used by people from dozens … Continue reading →

I am currently attending the Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose. Lots of great topics are being covered by immensely talented speakers who are passionate about sharing their knowledge. Here are a few pictures I took with my iPhone … Continue reading →

This new version of the compressor fixes a few bugs and optimizes string concatenations. You can now keep your code nicely formatted by concatenating string literals, but not suffer any performance hit. For example, the following code: var url = … Continue reading →

I am very pleased to announce the release of version 2.0 of the YUI Compressor. In addition to fixing several bugs and implementing a few enhancements suggested by the community, I also integrated Isaac Schlueter‘s regular expression based CSS minifier. … Continue reading →

Today, I found out that the good folks behind jQuery were using Packer, another great JavaScript compression utility by Dean Edwards, to distribute their compressed version of the library. The result: an amazingly small 21KB download! My first thought was: … Continue reading →

The release of the YUI Compressor last week has generated a lot of buzz and excitement throughout the web development community. Actually, after receiving so much great feedback, I felt compelled to issue a minor update as soon as possible … Continue reading →

Is there a need for a new JavaScript minifier? According to Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance Team, 40% to 60% of Yahoo!’s users have an empty cache experience and about 20% of all page views are done with an empty cache (see … Continue reading →

I wrote a prototype YUI-based image magnifier widget that makes use of VML on Internet Explorer and the Canvas tag on all the other A-grade browsers. Attached is a screenshot. To instantiate the widget, include the following source files in … Continue reading →

I hacked a search page optimized for the iPhone. It uses the Yahoo! Search API and bits of Joe Hewitt’s iUI library. The address is: Developing a web application for the iPhone is actually easier than traditional web development … Continue reading →

In this article, I describe how to implement a scriptable XPCOM Component. This type of component exposes some extra functionality to untrusted web-page JavaScript running inside a Gecko-based browser such as Firefox. The implementation itself will be done in JavaScript. … Continue reading →