| By RIA News Desk |
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| January 24, 2008 02:45 AM EST |
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Why are AJAX applications slow? The Founder & CTO of AJAXWorld 2008 East Gold Sponsor Nexaweb, Coach Wei, recently took some time to do some research in the area of AJAX performance issues, and conducted a JavaScript performance study. The three browsers in the study are IE 7, FireFox 2, and Safari 3. Today he published his results.
They can be viewed and read in full here.
The top six AJAX performance issues he pinpoints are:
1. Array performance on all browsers in general
2. HTML DOM performance in general
3. Calculating Computed Box Model and Style
4. FireFox: “eval”, Object Creation and “in” Operation
5. “String” Manipulation Performance on IE
6. Safari: “pop” Operation Performance
Wei then goes on to discuss where the industry could and should go from here.
"Obviously, we would like to see browser vendors take a serious look into the following issues," he writes, "and put them on their roadmap."
The issues are, says Wei:
- In all major browsers, performance with Array and HTML DOM needs improvement in general.
- Browsers need to provide API support for Computed Box Model and Style;
- FireFox needs to improve performance of “eval”, object creation and “in” operation
- Internet Explorer needs to improve performance in general to be at least on par with other browsers. Beyond that, “String” manipulation on IE needs continued improvements;
- Safari: “pop” operation performance needs improvement
- Just-in-time (JIT) compiler: This maybe a bigger task than an incremental fix of some existing features, however, it is worthy of every penny. JIT will not only fix the String manipulation issue, it will enable JavaScript to truly shine in matching the performance of native applications. The amount of client side logic (aka, JavaScript code) needs to grow in order to accommodate the growth of application complexity, for which JavaScript runtime performance problem can be a major bottleneck.
"But how can we get browser vendors to listen to us?" he asks rhetorically, then answers:
"First of all, help make some noise! The community needs to come together and your participation is crucial in making something happen.
Secondly, let’s look around and get some coordinated acts together. At OpenAjax Alliance (
http://www.openajax.org), we are starting a task force called “Runtime Advocacy Task Force”. At the OpenAjax 2007 September Member Meeting, the members of OpenAjax Alliance discussed the challenges for future Ajax growth and adoption, in particular, issues directly related to the various Ajax runtime environments. The collective wisdom was that OpenAjax Alliance should do something in this area to help creating a better Ajax eco-system. The work is still in its early stage, but watch for progress over the next month or so."
Ever since Google popularized a smarter, more responsive and interactive Web experience by using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) for its Google Maps & Gmail applications, SYS-CON's RIA News Desk has been covering every aspect of Rich Internet Applications and those creating and deploying them. If you have breaking RIA news, please send it to RIA@sys-con.com to share your product and company news coverage with AJAXWorld readers.
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