[Phpwm] Short Review of PHPCon UK 2006

[Iain Wallace]

> Iain asked, so here it is! 


Thanks, good writeup!

> AJAX at localhost by Harry Fuecks
> ------------------------------
> Harry's talk was about the issues in AJAX related to the network, that
> no one talks about. I don't know a lot about AJAX other than what I've
> seen on websites like Flickr. He talked mainly about latency and sync
> issues and gave to great demos. Harry posted links to the demos on his
> blog at http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/02/10/ajaxlocalhost/. He
> also talked about error checking with the JS XMLHttpRequest object.
> Basically you have to do all your own error stuff that you can take for
> granted with standard http requests.
> 

That's a good little demo. I think a lot of people are throwing AJAX at 
their web apps without any real appreciation of the downsides to it. 
Latency issues are compounded as well if your service actually gets 
quite popular (like del.icio.us) and lots of enthusiastic del.icio.us 
fans have created scripts which draw in content from it on web pages 
they're visiting. Result: far too many HTTP requests to RSS files, and a 
reduced quality of service for everyone.

The fact that every page on del.icio.us also has an RSS feed which these 
AJAX scripts run off is (I think) one of the reasons it's so slow, 
despite being owned and hosted by Yahoo these days.

When people are building AJAX for the first time, they often don't get 
the latency issue because their development server is on their own local 
network. I've actually been testing some of my stuff with a high latency 
connection recently by running it on my home web server, turning on 
loads of downloads on that server so I'm using up loads of bandwidth and 
then requesting pages from work! I think creating a fake proxy is 
probably a far easier way of achieving that ;)

Cheers,
Iain