Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)

YUI Theater — John Resig: “Testing, Performance Analysis, and jQuery 1.4″

John Resig (@jeresig) of Mozilla, creator of the popular jQuery JavaScript library, stopped by Yahoo! on Friday for a BayJax meetup and delivered a three-part tech talk, “Testing, Performance Analysis, and jQuery 1.4″.

In the first part of the talk, John reviewed the range of tools available to frontend engineers for unit testing and for analyzing the performance of code. In the latter case, he argues for going beyond pure speed-based benchmarks to structural analyses of performance. By looking at structure, the jQuery team was able to identify and correct bottlenecks, resulting in major performance improvements in the upcoming 1.4 release.

In the second part of the talk (beginning at 49:20 in the video), John reviews some of those jQuery 1.4 changes. In the short third section (beginning at 1:03:15), he looks at some interesting trends he’s noticed in the practical application of new HTML 5 elements — especially in older browsers.

If the video embed below doesn’t show up correctly in your RSS reader of choice, be sure to click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater.

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• A high-resolution, transcripted version of this talk is available on the YUI Theater site

Other Recent YUI Theater Videos:

• Luke Smith: Events Evolved — YUI engineer Luke Smith provides a deep introduction to the YUI 3 event system including its support for DOM events, event delegation, synthetic events, and custom events.
• Todd Kloots: YUI 3 Sugar — YUI engineer Todd Kloots presents an indispensable introduction to YUI 3’s powerful suite of tools.
• Douglas Crockford: The State and Future of JavaScript — Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford discusses the recent ECMA5 development process and efforts to improve the language in the future.
• Brendan Eich: ECMA Harmony and the Future of JavaScript — Brendan Eich, the creator of the world’s most popular programming language, talks about the struggle over the ES4 proposal and how it resulted in a specific set of proposals for ES5.

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