JIT-Compiled Resources in Razor Views - asp.net-mvc-3

We are currently reworking a WebForms based application to a MVC3/Razor system, and have hit a minor issue.
In our current solution, we have a large number of resources held within an external CMS that are compiled into our .aspx pages via a GlobalResource handler; this means that the hit on the CMS is low, and that the resources are only ever needed to be collected once for each individual page.
We can't seem to find any mechanism within Razor/MVC3 that would allow us to do the same thing - any pointers?

I'm not 100% sure I understand your question, but it sounds like you are using an HttpHandler to serve up a bundle of resources. There's no reason that code can't continue to work in MVC3 as-is. If you're doing something else, I'll need a little more clarification :). What's the underlying goal? To reduce the number of Http Requests per page?

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AngularJS - does everything need to loaded on initial page load?

I am diving into JavaScript MVC with Angular and as I understand it, along with the initial shell page, all your scripts must be loaded on the initial page load. However, and correct me if I'm wrong, that would mean that a majority of your scripts being loaded could be entirely useless (i.e. you have view #1 showing and scripts for views #2 - #10 aren't needed yet)?
In my case, I have a fairly large web app, with a feed page, results page, product page, profile page, among others. It amounts to 10+ pages, and my current (the traditional) approach is loading scripts specific to each page on load. Now each page is a partial and I don't believe it's possible to load specific scripts with partials?
So, part of my question is if my statements are accurate. The other is whether or not my fear of suffering on initial page load are justified (especially for mobile devices for instance).
I really got into Angular in hopes to clean up my JavaScript with the MVC approach and did not plan on taking advantage of it as a single page application (I can forego the use of routing different partials into my view, right?). But now I'm not sure. I just want to get a better understanding of how it works before making the leap.
Any help appreciated. Thanks!
Take a look into AMD pattern with Require.JS (Works with any type of JS framework). There is a seed project with AngularJS + RequireJS.

cakephp website confusing load times

I have a website that uses CakePHP 1.3.10. This CakePHP app it's pretty big, not in the amount of models or controllers (like 5 of each), but in the amount of plugins. I use the plugins as places of the website where users can access (or can't access) depending on if they have logged in already or not (well there's more reasons, but it's not important now, it's how it works). I also use a global Auth component in the app_controller.php
My issue is the following: I've noticed that the website is getting really slow when trying to access any of the pages of a plugin (when accessing the "home" page - which is not in a plugin - all is good).
The thing is that I was going to run some performance tests to figure out what's going on. I decided to create another website, exactly like the one I described, with the only difference that I removed all the plugins with the exception of one.
Amazingly (for me), when I access one of the pages of this plugin that I didn't delete, it goes super fast, like it should normally go.
So my question is: does the number of plugins really have a direct impact on the loading times of a page inside those plugins? Is there any way to "fix" this? Or is it just a coincidence and something else is going on that I missed?
Thanks so much in advance for any advise!
Reducing the amount of files and folders of my application has increased significantly the load times. I don't know what is the relation between amount of files/folders and loading speed in CakePHP, but it's a fact, at least in my website.
I've changed my cake installation to an advanced installation (as it explains in the cakephp boo) to have my files more spread out in different sub-apps, instead of having one huge app, and this has helped a lot!

Website optimization / decrease loading time in asp.net mvc 3

I have built a test website using nopCommerce open source , Everything is working fine , i need to know , why my website loading time is greater than 6 sec , the homepage works fine but the categories when clicked takes like 6-10 secs. how can i check the http request and calls to db so that i can track which function is taking a long times.
Test website is test website
Thanks
Things I would try in that order:
MvcMiniProfiler.
Analyze my code for possible performance bottlenecks using a .NET profiler.
Finally submit bugs to the nopCommerce support if the previous approaches didn't yield anything fruitful that would put my code into cause.
In between I might also checkout with my hosting provider whether he is not the cause of the slowness.
As a quick and dirty check, you can add the time it takes to generate the response as a column in the IIS logs - that will give you some idea as to whether the server is being slow to serve the pages or you need to do some front-end optimisation work.
On the front end side the first thing you need to do it merge all the CSS files for a theme into one to save on roundtrips - the browser can't render the page until it's got the CSS
All the .js files you have in the head will also block the page, can you merge them and load them later?
The performance of imagegen.ashx looks on the slow side - do you need to generate the banners on the fly or could they be pre-generated?
If the back-end side of generating the page is slow, there are some scripts around the web to show which queries are using the most CPU, making the most IO ops etc.
Below is a list of things you can improve,
1.Combine your js.
There are a few things you can use, for example, jsMin, you can read this [post] http://encosia.com/automatically-minify-and-combine-javascript-in-visual-studio/. However, jsmin doesn't seem to compress the combined js.
Another option is [jmerge] http://demo.lateralcode.com/jmerge/ It kinda does it after the fact, in the sense that you need to have the site ready to cobine them with jmerge since it only take a http link.
The best one I'v known so far is bundling and minification feature of MVC4. It's part of MVC4, however, you can get a Nuget package for you MVC 3 app.
Word of advice: bundling every js of yours is not necessarily a good idea, it even backfires someimtes, since you will end up with a big js that browser will have to download sequentially, instead of downloading several smaller ones. (you might want to look into head.js to make js download parallel) So the trick here is to keep the balance. I end up have a jquery from google CDN and bundled the rest of my js into one.
2.Put js at the bottom of the page so the browser doesnt have to load the js first before it starts to render the page. But you need to be careful with this one though, since normally you will have jquery functions doing stuff upon document.ready() at the header of the page, I adviese you moving that to the bottom of the page as well, if possible.
If you move the js reference and scirpt block in you layout page to the bottom, then you will most likely run into problem with nested js reference and js script blocks in your individual view. No worries, then you need to look into using #section (probably suitable for a discussion in an other thread) in your view and render it in your layout page, so that the referenced and script block inside your view get rendered at the bottom of the page at run time.
2.Use CDN
Pretty straight forward.
3.Combine CSS
Combine them into one, with the same tool you use for combining js, but you need to reference it at the page header, instead of the bottom.
4.Enable static content cache, something like this in your web config file
It won't help with first time load, but definitely will make it a lot faster for returning user.
5.Enable url compression
Time to first load
This is one of the metrics used by webpagetest.org. But dont bang your head against this one too much, as it basically says how fast your web server can serve the content. So probably not much you can do here form the software end.
Hope that would help!
NopCommerce is deadly slow, and the developers doesn't look in to the performance issue seriously. I have seen lot of performance related forums left unanswered. So best luck.

specific limitations of AJAX?

I'm still pretty new to AJAX and javascript, but I'm getting there slowly.
I have a web-based application that relies heavily on mySQL and there are individual user accounts that are accessed and the UI is populated with user specific data.
I'm working on getting rid of a tabbed navigation bar that currently loads new pages because all that changes from page to page is information within one box.
The thing is that box needs to reload info from the database, etc.
I have had great help from users here showing that I need to call the database within the php page that ajax is calling.
OK-so pardon the lengthy intro-what I'm wondering is are there any specific limitations to what ajax can call that I need to know about? IE: someone mentioned that it's best not to call script files and that I should remove scripts from the php page that is being called and keep those in the 'parent' page. Any other things like this I need to keep in mind?
To clarify: I'm not looking to discuss the merits/drawbacks of the technology. I'm wondering about specific coding implementation that I need to be aware of (for example-I didn't until yesterday realize that if even if I had established a mySQL connection on the page, that I would need to re establish that connection in my called page as well...makes perfect sense now).
XMLHttpRequest which powers ajax has a number of limitations. I recommend brushing up on the same origin policy. This is a pivotal rule because it limits where AJAX calls can be made.
First, you can't have Javascript embedded in the HTTP response to an AJAX call. That's a security issue.
No mention of the dynamics of the database, but if the data to be displayed in tabs doesn't have to be real-time, why not cache it server-side?
I find that like any other protocol, Ajax works best in tightly controlled conditions. It wouldn't make much sense for updating nearly the whole page, unless you find that the user experience is improved with an on-page 'loader'. Without going into workarounds, disadvantages will include losing the browser back button / history, issues such as the one your friend mentioned, and also embedded resources and other rich content can suffer as well, and just having an extra layer of complexity to deal with in your app. Don't treat it as magic sauce for your app - make sure every use delivers specific results that benefit your client / audience.
IMHO, it's best to put your client side javascript in a separate page and then import it - neater container. one thing I've faced before is how to call xml back which contains code to run such as more javascript - it's worth checking if this is likely earlier on and avoiding, than having to look at evals.
Mildly interesting.

How is AJAX implemented, and how does it help web dev?

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX, I get a fairly good grasp of what AJAX is. However, it looks like in order to learn it, I'd have to delve into multiple technologies at the same time to get any benefit out of it. So two questions:
What are resources that can help me understand/use AJAX?
What sort of website would benefit from AJAX?
If you aren't interested in the nitty gritty, you could use a higher-level library like JQuery or Prototype to create the underlying Javascript for you. The main benefit is a vastly more responsive user interface for web-based applications.
There are many libraries out there that can help you get benefit out of AJAX without learning about implementing callbacks, etc.
Are you using .NET? Look at http://ajax.asp.net. If you're not, then take a look at tools like qcodo for PHP, and learn about prototype.js, jquery, etc.
As far as websites that would benefit: Every web application ever. :) Anything you interact with by exchanging information, not just by clicking a link and reading an article.
Every website can benefit from AJAX, but in my opinion the biggest benefit to AJAX comes in data entry sections - forms basically. I have done entire sites where the front end - the part the user sees had almost no AJAX functionality in it. All the AJAX stuff was in the administration control panel for assisting in (correct!) data entry.
There is nothing worse than submitting a form and getting back an error, using AJAX you can pretty much prevent this for everything but file uploads.
I find it easiest to just stay away from all the frameworks and other helpers and just do basic Javascript. This not only lets you understand what's going on under the covers, it also lets you do it in the simplest way possible. There's really not much to it. User the JS XML DOM objects to create an xml document client side. Sent it to the server with XMLHTTPRequest, and then process the result, again using the JS XML DOM objects. Start with something simple. Just try sending one piece of information to the server, and getting a small piece of information back.
The Mozilla documentation is good. Sites that benefit from it the most are ones that behave almost like a desktop application and need high interactivity. You can usually improve usability on almost any site by using it, however.
Ajax should be thought of as a means to alter some content on a page without reloading the entire page.
So when do you need to do this? Really only when you have some user interactions or form information that you want to keep intact while you change some content on the page.

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