YUI Theater — Ross Harmes: “Porting Flickr to YUI 3″ (36 min.)

November 19, 2010 at 7:10 am by Eric Miraglia | In Development, YUI Theater | 2 Comments

Flickr Frontend Engineering Manager Ross Harmes talks about the process of rewriting the Flickr front end using YUI 3.

Ross Harmes is the Frontend Engineering Manger for Flickr, which recently completed a major presentation-tier rewrite using YUI 3. He was kind enough to join us at YUIConf 2010 to talk about that rewrite and how he and his team extracted maximum benefit from YUI 3′s various components.

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2 Comments

  1. I’ll repost the comment I’ve inadvertently sent in response to the wrong entry.

    About shortening long URLs, have you thought about compressing them (gzip, lzo or whatever fits your need) and encode the result base64? And if so, what made you decide against it? Possible caveat, you need to look out for decompression bombs and perhaps use a URL-safe base64 alphabet for convenience.

    If somebody wants to try that, you can test it out in Bash
    echo $QUERY_STRING | gzip -c -f - | base64 -w0

    Comment by Josh Davis — November 19, 2010 #

  2. Hi Josh,

    I’ll post the response I got to this question from Nolan Caudill, the PHP engineer here at Flickr that worked on the URL shortening algorithm:

    “It appears that the biggest wins from gzipping text comes when you have a large corpus of text, which makes sense, as you have more repeating pieces which means that the overhead of the encoding is minimized.

    Encoding just the individual filenames and then base64-encoding always results in a longer “compressed” version with my analysis. If we were able to compress the full URL before making the request (which would involved hacking YUI3′s combo loading), we would see much larger gains. Trying one of our long URLs resulted in a 52% compression rate. This is better than our current compression rate of around 72% for that same URL. Combining these two schemes we get a compression of 42%, which is nice.”

    Comment by Ross Harmes — November 22, 2010 #

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