Posts tagged ‘efficiency’

Firefox is great for web development mainly because of the large number of plug-ins available. Here’s my list:

  1. Web developer toolbar – great thing for the web development. Personally I use resizing features, password revealing and elements highlighting.
  2. Firebug – absolute winner. This is actually the main tool for development I use. I’m going to write a more detailed post about it later. For now, you can enjoy this video
  3. Cache status shows cached size in the status bar. But the main use is it’s ability to clear cache in a few clicks. This saves lots of time clicking here and there when developing complex JS application.
  4. Live HTTP Headers allows to view all HTTP headers that go here and there while you’re requesting the page. It’s a great thing when you need to grab some content from the password-protected area or inspect what’s going on when you request page.
  5. YSlow is a firebug plug-in from the Yahoo team which analyzes your content and shows you the ways of the client-size optimization of your page. It’s recommendations are really valuable. Try it and you’ll never uninstall it :)
  6. SitePoint HTML reference is a firebug plug-in too, that adds HTML help to the every HTML tag and CSS property. It also provides examples and best practices. I don’t think this is great value for gurus, but definitely useful for all others :)
  7. Fasterfox is a plug-in that boost Firefox performance. It is in the “experimental” state, but quite stable. I haven’t ever experience any problems with it.
  8. Selenium IDE is designed as a helper tool for creating selenium tests. It is really great and handy tool if you use automated testing. I’m going to cover this in my blog later.

And what are your favourite plug-ins? How do you use them?

Preface

In November 2008 I’ve got a nice project, that resulted in a complex search engine, that specializes in clothing. I can’t give the link now, but will do when site officially launches. Key features of such service are:

  • Large number of users, which search with various parameters, rate items, leave comments, create articles etc.
  • Large database, that is updated frequently

Sure, the site is running on a dedicated server, sure I use caching, but optimal DB is a key to success.

Continue reading ‘Building high-loaded portal – InnoDB vs MyISAM’ »

Preface

This is an introductory post to the series, where I’ll cover all design patterns, their usage, diagrams. Besides patterns, I am going to guide you through the principles of the high-quality application design. We’ll start from these principles (GRASP), and then advance to patterns, see how they use these principles and develop several systems (architecture only). The whole series will take 10-15 posts. However, I don’t have exact plan yet :) So, let’s go!

So what we’re talking about?

Actually, design pattern is no more, than a proven solution to some common problem. When saying “problem” I mean things you face with when developing the application architecture. These solutions are intended to make you application better – more extensible, flexible, simple.

Common examples of design problems (Let’s agree that in this series “design” means application, not graphics or DB design) are:
Continue reading ‘Creator and Information Expert principles – GRASP (Design patterns series)’ »

Once I had a task to import a number of data from datafeeds (that are in CSV or XML) into MySQL database. See solution in my another post. Here I want to tell about handling large files.

Datafeeds there are 50-200M each, so reading all file at once was not possible due to memory limitations. So we need to split it into portions. Here is the class, that solves the problem of downloading remote file, saving it locally and then reading by portions. Continue reading ‘Working with large files eficiently’ »