Archive for March, 2008

SWFUpload: upload files via Flash

This is a really cool project that I found out through Jonathan Boutelle’s presentation at SXSW’08 called AJAX and Flash mistakes. That’s basically what they use on Slideshare to upload documents to their system.

It seems pretty useful, and I’m already thinking about using it in a few projects in the future. You can find more details about it on the homepage.

My only concern is that in some scenarios you may want to avoid a hard dependency on Flash, but for consumer sites it seems like a safe choice.

Drip: memory leak detector for IE

I found out about Drip through John Resig’s Secrets of JavaScript Libraries panel at SXSW this year. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend his panel, but the presentation document seems like a good read.

Anyway, Drip is a memory leak detector application for Internet Explorer. It basically runs IE within the application itself, and analyzes the memory usage for any leaks. Seems really really useful, and just by playing with it for a few minutes I already found a couple of pieces of code to fix.

New features in PHP 5.3

Ilia Alshanetsky gave a very interesting presentation at PHP Quebec on the new features planned for PHP 5.3.

Looks like we will finally get namespace support in PHP.

Random interesting links

IE8 performance improvements

Steve Souders wrote some thoughts on performance improvements happening in IE8, with their change to support 6 parallel downloads from the same hostname at the same time.

Previously IE would download and execute the JavaScript files in sequence, to make sure that no changes to the DOM would happen in the wrong order. Now IE8 downloads all script files in parallel (up to the new limit of 6 downloads at a time), and then will execute them in sequence.

According to Steve, there’s a big difference for some sites. Facebook for instance takes a 80% performance gain while using IE8 and having an empty cache.

By the way, I didn’t know Steve had a blog — Subscribed.

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