The VP Geek Speaks

Another Micro-Optimization Provides Useless Results

One of the things to remember about performance optimizations performed in isolation is that their results are rarely representative of real-world performance results. This article outlines the “findings” of the students at a couple of Canadian universities, and comes to the conclusion that string concatenation in memory is slower than writing the same total number of bytes to disk, one after the other.

String concatenation is a slow and CPU-heavy operation. It drastically affects Micro-Optimization testing when both algorithms do not utilize it.

#javascript #python #web-development

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Verify Magento User Access to Admin Functionality

When working with Magento, there will inevitably come a time where you need to manually check to see if the currently logged-in user has access to a specific piece of functionality as defined in the ACL settings. Personally, I have come across this situation more often when creating my own custom modules and their custom permissions, but they can be used to check the permissions of any module.

As is so often the case, Alan Storm has documented the exact solution for this scenario. Lets say that your ACL configuration is setup as it is below…

Laravel Removed The QuickStart For Version 5

To start out, I want to be clear that what follows should not be interpreted to be a criticism of the software framework that those that work on Laravel publish, nor an indictment of open-source software as a whole. Rather, it is a look at how some projects, open or closed source make it harder than it should be for new users/developers to utilize their terrific products.

It seems experts conveniently “forget” the tips and tricks and tribulations it takes to learn a new technology, covering it all with, “It’s just so easy”.

#magento #web-development #php

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Google Chrome Improves JavaScript Speeds Again

One of the old rules of optimizing website load times for all browsers was that the browser didn’t begin to parse the downloaded JavaScript until each file was downloaded. Starting with Chrome 41, Google has announced that this is no longer the case.

In this announcement, Google has said that new versions of Chrome will begin parsing JavaScript as it is downloaded to the browser, even before the particular file’s download is complete. However, in order to see this happen more quickly, you must utilize the async or deferred tags in the <script> tag. JavaScript that is loaded without async or deferred is still a completely blocking action that pauses all rendering while downloading and parsing the JavaScript files. According to Google, this can improve website load time by up to 10%.

Google To Begin Rewarding Mobile-Friendly Websites

Google recently announced that beginning April 21, 2015, they would start slightly rewarding websites that are mobile-friendly at the expense of sites that are not. There are several things that Google looks at to determine whether or not a site is easy for a user on a mobile device to view and navigate. Some of the things that Google looks for include the following:

1. Fonts that are big enough to be legible
2. Users don’t have to scroll left and right to see content
3. Links are big enough and have enough space around them to be clickable with a touch of a finger.
4. Avoids technologies that are not present on mobile devices, like Flash.

If you make sure that you follow the above guidelines, your site will be prepared for the upcoming change in Google’s search results. To find out more, check out Google’s blog post.

Run Multiple Python mod_wsgi Websites With Apache On Windows

Yes, this sounds completely crazy, but there is a semi-valid need to do this, unfortunately. However, when you need to run multiple Python websites on Apache on Windows via mod_wsgi, it quickly becomes apparent that using the typical <VirtualHost> configuration options do not work as expected.

When you try to do it with a <VirtualHost> configuration, you will be unable to setup a separate WSGIPythonPath configuration setting per virtual host, as that configuration directive is not allowed within a <VirtualHost> node. Instead, you have a single WSGIPythonPath for your entire Apache instance.

Top 5 Reasons To Test Your Website Across Browsers

I would hope that those of you taking the time to read this posting would have some idea of why you should perform some level of testing of the software and websites you create. However, I am keenly aware that some management types don’t always understand the importance of testing until an untested “feature” appears in the wild, frustrating all that run across it.

1. Ensure Cross Browser Compatibility- Unless you develop a website for internal usage only, where you are able to successfully restrict users to a specific version of a specific browser, Cross Browser Compatibility ensures your site functions well for the greatest number of users.
2. Detect Shallow Errors - Simply loading a website for a quick look in all the major browsers allows you to find 95% of all the browser compatibility errors for your site.
3. Discover Performance Issues - Typically, older and less-advanced browsers, such as Internet Exporer, and the older versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are unable to process the CSS, JavaScript, and HTML that the most recent and more-advanced versions of these browsers handle with ease.
4. Prioritize Backwards Compatibility - I have heard countless times that we need to make sure this website supports browser versions that were released more than a decade ago. Instead of just making excuses for why you can’t support them, testing your site in the older browsers first allows you to put a more accurate time estimate that supporting these browsers will require. Its amazing to see how the requirements for supporting old and outdated browsers evaporate as the time and cost estimates begin to add up.
5. CYA - Whether it is your internal customer that is requesting the new website or you are an agency working with another individual or business for a new website, the last thing you want to have happen is that the customer open the site when it goes live in a browser you have not tested yet and has major issues. Establish ahead of time what the list of supported browsers will be and make sure to test all of them. If you have time, test the next most popular browsers or versions of popular browsers.

While testing your website may not be the most exciting part of web development, it definitely will save you time and money in the long run.

When Is Enough CSS Enough?

One of the major pushes in web development today is to try to do as much of the styling of a website as is possible from within the CSS of the site. The idea behind this is that when you do so, you remove styling responsibilities from your JavaScript and HTML content, resulting in a much better separation of concerns. The other aspect of this is that CSS styling is typically handled in a more native fashion in the browser as compared to what you can accomplish via Javascript.

Google Code Shutting Down

Google just recently announced that they are going to begin the process of shutting down their Google Code project hosting service. In the blog post announcing that they were shuttering the service, they let it slip that even Google had quit using Google Code for their project hosting, instead transitioning thousands of their projects to GitHub. Google seemingly blames the fact that GitHub and BitBucket handle project hosting better than Google does as the main reason that they are discontinuing the service.

Never Explicitly Trust Software Because It Is Open-Source

One of the major ideas behind open source projects is that allowing anyone that wants to view the source code of a project to be able to do so should make bugs and security weaknesses easy to find. While this did not work so well with OpenSSL and its various bugs that have been exposed recently, I do have an example where it worked extremely well.

Magento is an eCommerce platform that has two separate editions. One is a completely open-source and free as in beer Community edition. The other is a somewhat expensive Enterprise Edition. There is a large community of Magento developers that create extentions, or addons, for these two editions of Magento.