Toluu : Niall Kennedy's Weblog

Niall Kennedy's Weblog

Tracking how syndication and emerging new businesses are changing life on the Web.

Rewriting Twitter for web best practicesNovember 19 2008

Last week I decided to rewrite the Twitter.com front-end on Google App Engine to incorporate modern front-end programming best practices, exceptional performance, and establish a solid platform for further development. TwitterFE.com is a fully-functional read-only clone of Twitter.com designed to make your web browser sing. I created the site as an example of web development best practices anyone can integrate into their web presence.

The new web front-end on TwitterFE.com features localized templates, expressive markup, distinct URL structures, integrated site search, geo-distributed dynamic and static servers, and more available features than Twitter.com. In this post I will outline some of the changes I've applied to the Twitter front-end reproduction as they apply to general front-end web development.

Inside the iPhone App Store acceptance processSeptember 16 2008

Apple's iPhone OS App Store is a little over two months old and already the focus of both hype and fear among members of the press. KPCB has already invested more than $30 million through its iPhone-specific fund. Established companies are writing iPhone applications for the first time. A few applications have been banned, as expected with most platforms. Apple's relative secrecy regarding the iPhone platform and distribution policies have caused market uncertainties in need of some further clarity. In this post I will examine the iPhone OS 2.0 platform and the iPhone App Store from the point of view of Apple and other hosted storefront providers.

As I write this post there are over 3400 applications available from the iTunes App Store. 90% of those apps are available for both iPhone and iPod touch. 76% of App Store listings require payment ($1 or more). Developers may distribute an iPhone OS 2.0 application directly to handsets using their own infrastructure or distribute through Apple's App Store built-in to iTunes and iPhone OS.

The story behind Google ChromeSeptember 3 2008

Google released its second web browser yesterday afternoon, adding additional headroom for web applications stretching the limits of what it's possible to accomplish within a web browser. The Google Chrome team assembled domain experts in various fields over the past six years, both through direct hires and acquisitions, to create a new browser and its critical components from scratch. GMail and Google Maps pushed the Web to its limits, taking advantage of browser technologies invented in Redmond but left dormant for far too long. Contributing to Firefox's core, writing browser extensions, and championing HTML could only take the $150 billion company so far: they needed to own the full browser to push their Web efforts forward at full speed.

Google App Engine for developersApril 10 2008

On Monday 2Google launched Google App Engine, a hosted dynamic runtime environment for Python web applications inside Google's geo-distributed architecture. Google App Engine is the latest in a series of Google-hosted application environments and the first publicly-available dynamic runtime and storage environment based on large-scale propriety computing systems.

Google App Engine lets any Python developer execute CGI-driven Web applications, store its results, and serve static content from a fault-tolerant geo-distributed computing grid built exclusively for modern Web applications. I met with the App Engine's team leads on Monday morning for an in-depth overview of the product, its features, and its limitations. Google has been working on the Google App Engine since at least March 2006 and has only just begun revealing some of its features. In this post I will summarize Google App Engine from a developer's point of view, outline its major features, and examine pitfalls for developers and startups interested in deploying web applications on Google's servers.

What is Google App Engine?

Google App Engine is a proprietary virtualized computing suite covering the major common components of a modern web application: dynamic runtime, persistent storage, static file serving, user manag

iPhone web app performanceFebruary 6 2008

The Exceptional Performance group at Yahoo! just released a detailed performance analysis of web applications on the iPhone. Yahoo! analyzed the full capabilities of the iPhone's Safari browser including browser cache and transfer speeds.

Cache persistence

The Safari browser on iPhone allocates memory from the shared system memory but does not save web content into persistent storage. Any cached objects (CSS, JavaScript, images, etc.) are removed from memory on reboot.

Optimal component size

Safari for iPhone will only cache files 25 KB or smaller served using the Expires explicit expiration time or Cache-Control max-age directive HTTP headers. Safari decodes the file before saving it cache, meaning your total unzipped file size must squeeze under the 25 KB ceiling to hit the cache. Components already in cache are only replaced by new cacheable components using the least recently used algorithm.

Safari for iPhone is able to cache a maximum of 19 external components, placing a maximum cache limit at around 475 KB.

Download speed

Yahoo! found typi