João Prado Maia’s Weblog

Back in July of last year Steven Frank released the first version of his Gems game for the iPhone. It was a pretty simple “match the colored gems” game, but each game was limited by 60 seconds.

I modified it a bit to remove the time limitation and also changed it to use new images for each gem. You can play it for as long as you want now.

Those first few weeks with the iPhone was a lot of fun. No documentation whatsoever for what you could do with MobileSafari, so it was fun figuring things out.

• Understanding the output generated by JSLint
• Comparing the benchmarks of PHP versions 3 through 5.3
• 10 principles of effective web design
• Really cool image zoom JavaScript library (very smooth animation!)
• Somewhat cool extensions to script.aculo.us to implement the iPhone wobble and illuminate effects in JavaScript
• Plotr, an interesting JavaScript charting library built on top of Prototype

Just read about the potential performance implications of having thousands of tables in a single MySQL database over at Ask Bjørn Hansen’s blog.

We have that type of setup at Alert Logic, but I don’t remember any problems while shutting down the database server. I wonder if the FLUSH TABLES problem only happens that badly under MyISAM instead of InnoDB?

While I’m on a roll here with praise for Firebug and YSlow, I have to point out a great book on performance tuning for web applications or web sites: High Performance Web Sites, by Steve Souders.

This is one of the best books I have ever read on performance work for web applications, especially because of all of the research that Steve did while working as Chief Performance Engineer at Yahoo! He has since moved on to Google to continue his performance research there.

YSlow is a Firefox extension that is integrated with Firebug that analyzes your web pages and recommends improvements. This book discusses the 14 rules for great performance that are used by YSlow.

Firebug is one of those web development tools that you can’t just live without. It’s kind of funny just thinking how hard life used to be before we had this wonderful extension available.

Even though this extension is pretty much perfect, even more so when you also install the YSlow add-on, there is work going on right now on the new 1.1 version of Firebug. You can download a beta version here: http://getfirebug.com/releases/allReleases.html