Posts by: Barney Hanlon

• Speedy Sites: Building the Stack May 8, 2013

  In the previous post about speedy sites, we discussed the static assets of a site, and how providing them to users can be optimised through selective use of aggregation and HTML. Let’s move away from considering what to give the user, and instead look at how we provide it to them: the stack.

  How do we define "the stack"? For the purposes of this article, the stack represents everything between the user and the PHP generating the content they see. As with all performance tuning work, you will need to have a sandbox to try out these techniques, and see what works for you. Often this will be a mixture of several technologies, which I affectionately refer to as the "Speed Sandwich", with each layer doing a specific role to improve the overall performance of the user experience, while aiming to limit complexity to a few distinct components. We want to give the end user the page they requested as fast as possible. So how can we achieve this? (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Speedy Sites and Why You Need Them March 27, 2013

  Anyone who went to the PHP Conference 2013 in London hopefully saw Ilia Alshanetsky’s talk on analysing bottlenecks in your application, which had some great techniques for how to test the performance of your site. This article assumes you've taken a look at his slides or are already familiar with Google Chrome’s Developer Tools, so you can refer to the Network tab to gain insight into what is happening to your users. Other tools such as YSlow and Pingdom will also help in gathering data, though they don’t tell the full story.

  What happens though if you complete your analysis and you do have a bottleneck, and it’s going to take a while to fix? Or you have some sluggish legacy code that is a huge lump of technical debt? Fixing sites is hard, and as engineers, we are frequently attracted to the most difficult technical challenges. We want to fix the problem, not mask it. That said, there are many ways we can deal with performance without actually fixing the problem, while keeping users even happier. (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Creative MVC: Meet the ViewModel Pattern November 2, 2010

  In this article we will introduce a powerful new tool in the arsenal of developers - the ViewModel. This provides MVC applications a natural location for presentation logic and lazy functionality while maintaining the segregation between the layers of responsibility within the code. It allows designers access to data and methods they need, while hiding aspects that aren't needed at view level.
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