Following the previous article Combine and minimize JavaScript and CSS files for faster loading, I implemented a similar solution as a Maven plugin.
This plugin combines and minimizes JavaScript and CSS files using YUI Compressor for faster page loading.
More details can be found on the Maven Minify Plugin page.
On most sites, the major component of download time is not the base HTML file itself, but the number of subsequent HTTP requests to load the page’s supporting files – CSS, JavaScript, images, etc.
Each of those are extra HTTP requests, and each unique request takes a relatively long time.
The fewer requests to the server that the browser has to make, the faster the page will load.
There is an inherent overhead in each HTTP request. It takes substantially less time to serve one 60K file than it does three 20K files and a lot less than it does six 10K files.
This post will explain how to combine and minimize CSS and JavaScript files using YUI Compressor and Ant.
This can be done by just concatenating all files into two combined files (one for CSS and one for JavaScript) and minimize them. You can quickly go from 10 or more files down to 2, and their size can be greatly reduced.
To keep the modularity that comes with splitting these files out by section (or business unit), keep them split in your development process, and combine them in your build process. A first Ant task will combine them and a second task will generate their minimized versions.
This technique has been successfully used in libraries such as jQuery, MooTools, Dojo, ExtJS, YUI, etc, allowing developers to better organize their code.
» Read more: Combine and minimize JavaScript and CSS files for faster loading
No matter how anxiously expected, the release of IE8 hasn’t resulted in the end of the support for the old, deprecated, IE6 rendering engine. Giving us, the web developers, need to test against yet another version of IE.
Hopefully the eighth version is going to be a lot easier to test and support since it’s more standards compliant and in that perspective, much closer to the other modern browsers. It’s also comes with easier debugging functionality as it has an integrated set of developer tools available by pressing F12 or by clicking ‘Developer Tools’ under Tools menu.
But right now, together with other major players (Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome) you can end up with a total of 7 browsers to test. You might even want to test different versions of individual browsers, transforming this task into a nightmare. Fortunately tools, allowing you to compare different rendering engines in a single unified interface, are emerging and can really save the day. Two great examples are:
For a complete list of browser’s compatibility, check the great Compatibility Master Table from QuirksMode.
For those getting a SocketTimeoutException when calling an Axis 1.4 Web Service.
This may be a solution for your problem.
If your log show an error similar to this:
12:38:51,693 ERROR [TerminalSessionHelper] ; nested exception is:
java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out
AxisFault
faultCode: {http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/}Server.userException
faultSubcode:
faultString: java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out
faultActor:
faultNode:
faultDetail:
{http://xml.apache.org/axis/}stackTrace:java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out
...
And your call looks like this:
TerminalSessionService terminalSessionService = new TerminalSessionServiceLocator(); TerminalSession_PortType terminalSession_PortType = terminalSessionService.getTerminalSession(); ((TerminalSessionSOAPBindingStub) terminalSession_PortType).setTimeout(15000);
Try to use CommonsHTTPSender as the Transport Sender of the Axis client:
BasicClientConfig basicClientConfig = new BasicClientConfig(); SimpleChain simpleChain = new SimpleChain(); simpleChain.addHandler(new CommonsHTTPSender()); basicClientConfig.deployTransport("http", simpleChain); TerminalSessionService terminalSessionService = new TerminalSessionServiceLocator(basicClientConfig); TerminalSession_PortType terminalSession_PortType = terminalSessionService.getTerminalSession(); ((TerminalSessionSOAPBindingStub) terminalSession_PortType).setTimeout(15000);
This also has the advantage to use HTTP 1.1 instead of HTTP 1.0.
Note: You will need to add the common-httpclient.jar and common.codec.jar to the jar directory for this to work.
Still want to use HTTP 1.0? No problem, just add the following line of code:
((TerminalSessionSOAPBindingStub) terminalSession_PortType)._setProperty(
MessageContext.HTTP_TRANSPORT_VERSION, HTTPConstants.HEADER_PROTOCOL_V10);
Hope this can save your time. Axis can be really painful…
Everyone knows that documentation is not one of JBoss strengths.
This article is meant to fill this gap. It describes and exemplifies how to configure JBoss PojoCache as a MBean service, using loadtime transformations with JBossAop framework, so you don’t need precompiled instrumentation.
This section gives you an introduction about PojoCache and its advantages over TreeCache (a plain cache system).
PojoCache is an in-memomy, transactional, and replicated POJO (plain old Java object) cache system that allows users to operate on a POJO transparently without active user management of either replication or persistency aspects. PojoCache, a component of JBossCache (uses PojoCache class as an internal implementation, the old implementation TreeCacheAop has been deprecated.), is the first in the market to provide a POJO cache functionality. JBossCache by itself is a 100% Java based library that can be run either as a standalone program or inside an application server.
TreeCache limitations:
- Users will have to manage the cache specifically; e.g., when an object is updated, a user will need a corresponding API call to update the cache content.
- If the object size is huge, even a single field update would trigger the whole object serialization. Thus, it can be unnecessarily expensive.
- The object structure can not have a graph relationship. That is, the object can not have sub-objects that are shared (multiple referenced) or referenced to itself (cyclic). Otherwise, the relationship will be broken upon serialization.
PojoCache advantages:
- No need to implement Serializable interface for the POJOs.
- Replication (or even persistency) is done on a per-field basis (as opposed to the whole object binary level).
- The object relationship and identity are preserved automatically in a distributed, replicated environment. It enables transparent usage behavior and increases software performance.
Internationalization, or i18n, is the design and development of a product, application or document content that enables easy localization for target audiences that vary in culture, region, or language. Localization refers to the adaptation of a product, application or document content to meet the language, cultural and other requirements of a specific target market (a “locale”).
Adapting application to various languages is for me, as a Java and HTML developer, more than a common task. Usually the solution involves a set of supported locales, which is very often different from the system locale and/or browser configuration. Majority of such cases are covered by the scenario when user chooses particular language settings and the only place where the locale setting can be stored is the HTTP Session.
Support for this behavior is now handled by majority of frameworks; nevertheless there is still one HTML element that you can’t effectively change – the file upload form field.
» Read more: Internationalization of the File Upload Form Field
Update: Please read Improving web performance with Apache and htaccess for an updated version of this article.
.htaccess – gzip and cache your site for faster loading and bandwidth saving is one of the most popular posts on samaxes.
It’s basically on how to compress and cache your site content with Apache and .htaccess file.
It works like a charm, but it’s not yet the perfect configuration for me.
I wanted something that I can use out-of-the-box without having to rely on external extension modules or tools.
If you are lucky enough to have Apache 2 with your hosting provider you can use the mod_deflate module that comes bundled with it.
In order to compress your text files with this Apache’s module you just have to add the following lines to your .htaccess file:
<ifModule mod_deflate.c>
<filesMatch "\.(css|js|x?html?|php)$">
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</filesMatch>
</ifModule>
This will gzip all your *.css, *.js, *.html, *.html, *.xhtml, and *.php files.
» Read more: Speed up your site by compressing and caching your content with .htaccess
With the new year starting, I decided to try some changes here at samaxes.com.
First, I’ve changed the blog theme to a slightly modified Derek Punsalan’s Grid Focus.
Some of these modifications were mostly due to some complains about the size of the content column versus the sidebars columns on the previous theme. Since this is mainly a technical blog it makes it easily on the eye to have a wider content column.
Another visual change was the code syntax highlighting plugin. I was using the SyntaxHighlighter Plus and now I’m using WP-CodeBox.
SyntaxHighlighter Plus served me well in the past, but it has some disadvantages, such as:
Although I’m using browser caching, 70-80% of this blog visitors are new visitors, so the cache won’t help them. This means that I should try to minimize the number of HTTP requests as much as I can.
WP-CodeBox is based on the GeSHi syntax highlighter. All the parsing is executed on the server side and it supports a lot more languages than the SyntaxHighlighter.
» Read more: Fresh Layout for 2009
I really enjoy jQuery. But finding the right UI widget can be a daunting task.
Autocomplete is one of those widgets.
I decided to share an asynchronous example on how to use the jQuery Autocomplete plugin with Stripes.
Here’s an example output:
» Read more: Stripes framework and jQuery Autocomplete
JBoss announced the GA release of JBoss AS 5.0.
JBoss 5 is the next generation of the JBoss Application Server build on top of the new JBoss Microcontainer. The JBoss Microcontainer is a lightweight container for managing POJOs, their deployment, configuration and lifecycle. It is a standalone project that replaces the famous JBoss JMX Microkernel of the 3.x and 4.x JBoss series. The Microcontainer integrates nicely with the JBoss framework for Aspect Oriented Programming, JBoss AOP. Support for JMX in JBoss 5 remains strong and MBean services written against the old Microkernel are expected to work.
JBoss5 is designed around the advanced concept of a Virtual Deployment Framework (VDF), that takes the aspect oriented design of many of the earlier JBoss containers and applies it to the deployment layer. Aspectized Deployers operate in a chain over a Virtual File System (VFS), analyze deployments and produce metadata to be used by the JBoss Microcontainer, which in turn instantiates and wires together the various pieces of a deployment, controlling their lifecycle and dependencies.
See the full release notes and downloads page.
And good luck to get your J2EE applications working with this new version.
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