This is one of the very rare occasions where Microsoft actually did something cool. A couple days ago I needed to test one of my web apps with Internet Explorer 8 and just for giggles with IE6 – although we’ve dropped support for that dinosaur a while ago. Remembering my previous experience with IE8 and my inability to go back to 7 all too well – yes don’t laugh at me, I should have known better I know – I was preparing to fire up VMWare and create two XP Images, one for each browser version. But imagine my surprise when I discovered that Microsoft actually offers pre-configured ready to launch Windows XP VirtualPC Images for every possible IE version for free.
Be advised that these images expire in a couple of months but Microsoft seems to make new images available shortly before the old ones expire.
Here’s the link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7c2b5317-a40f-4e86-8835-d37170c5923e&displaylang=en
I admit it – I’m a performance junkie. I can’t stand code that just works but performs poorly. Being said, I recently fell in love with Django (a fantastic Python powered web application framework). In one of my current projects – xarmory.com – the number of requests for static resources issued during page load began to bother me. The project makes intensive use of jQuery and it’s my personal belief that Django + jQuery is a match made in heaven. When working with jQuery you will find yourself often in the situation to rely in cool little jQuery plugins – each distributed as a seperate javascript file of course. When a project grows, those files begin to add up. In the case of xarmory.com we now had eleven javascript references in the header section of the page. Although the individual files are were only 3-11k in Size, the request overhead for all those tiny files became unacceptably in my eyes.
To alleviate the problem I decided to resort to a simple solution and just merge the individual script files into a single file. A pretty common practice. Before reinventing the wheel I surfed the net for existing solutions and found two which I gave a shot. Short story, both solutions had their share of problems mostly stemming from the fact that they wanted to do it all and integrate their own Javascript Minifier in addition to the merging. During my short evaluation both Minifiers choked on fifty percent of my javascript files, even on the official jquery 1.2.6 script. A bit frustrated I decided to roll out my own Django Template Tag based on this code.
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