Selenium RC allows you to write unit tests in PHP (or a bunch of other programming languages), and get access to the browser as it is executing your test. If you could get access to YSlow’s results from JavaScript, then you could export that information directly to PHP, parse it, and store it. Add a few scripts to build some simple reports and you are done: performance metrics that you can track and act upon.

I was going to suggest this feature at Velocity last week, but there was no time for questions on most of the sessions. Here’s hoping this doesn’t happen next year.

The good:

• Very cool demonstrations of HTTPWatch, Fiddler and AOL Pagetest. I played with two of these tools before, and having the author’s there showing you a couple of the features was really helpful. AOL Pagetest seems like a pretty cool tool too.
• The announcement of Jiffy (and the Jiffy Firebug extension) brought in a whole new perspective into measurement of performance data, and that is a huge deal.
• Awesome content on Bill Scott’s session about the performance work that his team did at Netflix. Good advice in there on large XHTML pages and event handlers for sprite images.
• Session from Eric Schurman (no blog?) at Microsoft about their performance work on improving the interaction of Live Search, all the way from a lot of AJAXy features, to a more simple approach. I asked him about the tool that generated some of his nice performance graphs, and he said that they are thinking about possibly open-sourcing it.
• Good content on image optimization from Stoyan Stefanov, something most people often forget. We have a build system that does this automatically, but we should also have something in there to make sure we use PNG8s instead of GIFs whenever possible. Added to my TODO list.

The bad:

• 15 minute sessions? Are you kidding me? It was such a rush to get these sessions finished in time, that in the end there was no space left to even ask a question. All of the good performance sessions were either 15 minutes in length, or just 10 minutes (for the demonstrations of HTTPWatch, Fiddler, etc). I’m sure there must be a reason for this, but it seems completely wrong.
• The actual space in the second room was very small for the number of people in the sessions. It seemed like most of the performance talks happened in the small room, and it was packed to the brim. Also, not much ventilation in that room.
• Seems a bit expensive to be paying ~$1400 for a two day conference, when the MySQL Conference was the same price for 4 days worth of sessions.
• Why was there a 45 minute break in the second day, right after starting the day? The second day started at 9:15am, and by 10:30am there was already a break. Let’s get some sessions going.
• Can we go without the spammy keynotes in the future? I have no desire to go through 30 minutes of a Sun executive telling me about this server with 1TB of SSD memory that will be available “pretty soon” for commodity prices. “Great as a memcached server.” Excuse me? This is a joke about the memcached server, right?
• Even further, can we do fewer keynotes in the future? The first day had 7 keynotes, and while some of them might be interesting, it’s not interesting to everyone. Let’s change some of those into regular sessions, so the people that are interested can go to them, and whoever is not can skip them. For instance, Eucalyptus seems like a cool project, but giving it 30 minutes (as a keynote no less!) while the session on Varnish only had 15 minutes was completely wrong.
• Where are all of the talks on memcached, gearman, TheSchwartz, nginx? I want to know more about these tools, and not just the basics that I could read from the documentation. I want war stories and tutorials on how to get started, and some reliable advice from big deployments. Where’s Brad Fitzpatrick?
• Enough with the “clouds”. Please. Think of the children.

The conference was still very good, but the biggest issue was the amount of time reserved for the performance sessions that I was looking forward to.

I will try to get approval to go again next year!

Google I/O is a self-proclaimed developer gathering happening in San Francisco at the end of this month (just two days though, May 28-29). It seems like a really cool event with lots of sessions about Web stuff in general.

The downside is that there will be around 70 sessions in a two day window, each with a time limit of 1 hour. So it seems like it will be kind of rushed, and I wonder how many attendees will miss a session because 4 other interesting ones are happening at the same time. Maybe expanding the number of days would have been a bit better.

It doesn’t look like I will be able to go as we will be finishing up on an upcoming release of our product.

• PDO_MYSQLND – A new PDO extension that is compatible with PDO_MySQL, but uses the mysqlnd library to deal with the database server.
• DbUnit – an extension to standard PHPUnit to deal with database-related unit tests.
• Buildbot – cool little utility that lets you automate a lot of tasks to achieve continuous integration of software projects. I need to play with this and see if it would work for some of our unit tests.
• Varnish – a new high-performance reverse proxy, kind of like Squid, but made for this type of work.

Took me a while to publish this draft :(

Registration before May 5th entitles you to an early bird discount, bringing the total to $1,145.00. Pretty expensive for a two day conference. I also hoped that there would be a session specific to YSlow (and the 13 performance rules), but no luck.