Description:

As Phil Karlton said, “there are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” Despite enormous advances in the field of web development over the last five years, it remains difficult to use caching to allow sites to scale for expanding user bases. Fortunately, the last few years have also seen the rise of JavaScript libraries that take a lot of the pain out of client-side programming. In this talk, we’ll explore techniques for making your sites feel faster, without resorting to complicated caching schemes, while maintaining strict separation of content, style, and behavior.

Using a sample Rails app, we'll look at client side code to do the following:

• Reduce initial load time
• Render content inline via AJAX
• Increase responsiveness
• Background-load content
• Isolate bottlenecks
• Eliminate blocking operations

The goal is that the talk will serve three purposes: to explain some of the psychology behind user impressions of website performance, to introduce unobtrusive javascript to the uninitiated, and to describe some novel techniques to more experienced web developers.