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Dynamic paths in external javascript and stylesheets
Posted on April 19th, 2010 No commentsBest practices dictate that unobtrusive javascript is king these days which means that all javascript should live in external js files instead of cluttering up the html. Simple enough, however, situations arise sometimes where you need to adapt your javascript for dynamic conditions of the application, most notably, the current base directory where your application lives. If your application is small enough you can just hard code paths to images, other scripts, or internal urls however if you are anything like me, you probably shudder at the thought of hard coding any thing. Take this use case into consideration: let’s say we have an external javascript file called myscript.js which houses all of our javascript for handling click events on ajax powered links throughout the site.
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Queued, Concatenated, and Gzipped Assets with the Zend Framework
Posted on November 18th, 2009 2 commentsLinking assets to your templates and layouts is always a mine field. Every person has a different way of doing it and if it is done poorly, it can adversely affect the load time of your website, particularly if you have lots of websites. It’s helpful to understand how the http protocol fetches things like stylesheets and javascript files while it’s loading your page. In order to alleviate traffic for any individual server, a browser is limited to only so many concurrent requests to the same host. I do not recall what that limit is on each browser but I’m sure google does but in any case, if your site is of significant scope, chances are, you are going to need more assets than your browser can pull in at once. If you don’t believe me, install the yslow extension for firefox and run it on a page with many assets and you will see what i’m talking about.
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