How to improve speed of your mobile web application?

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Creating a mobile web application is fairly simple – just scale a website for a smaller screen and it works flawlessly. But there is a problem – a mobile web application still feels and acts like a website, it is just smaller version of a desktop website. It is slow when displaying some kind of simple animations – for example slide toggle.

Nowadays it is fairly easy for developers to create a responsive website (e.g website, which scales itself automatically according to the screen size). Some people just use media queries , another use ready-made boilerplates like Bootstrap, Skeleton or Bones (for creating responsive WordPress template).

To get best experience from your mobile web/html application, using CSS3 transitions is the key. When usual transitions are just changing DOM and usage of hardware acceleration is minimal, CSS3 transitions are always using hardware/GPU acceleration and this gives a very big performance improvement and your application becomes very responsive.

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Reading binary data using jQuery Ajax

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jQuery is an excellent tool to make web development easy and straightforward. It helps while doing DOM manipulation and makes Ajax requests painless across different browsers and platforms. But if you want make an Ajax request, which is giving binary data as a response, you will discover that it does not work for jQuery, at least for now. Changing “dataType” parameter to “text”, does not help, neither changing it to any other jQuery supported Ajax data type.

Problem here is that jQuery still does not support HTML5 XMLHttpRequest Level 2 binary data type requests – there is even a bug in jQuery bug tracker, which asks for this feature. Although there is a long discussion about this subject on the GitHub, it seems that this feature will not become part of jQuery soon.

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Creating basic JavaScript encryption between Frontend and Backend.

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One big problem with JavaScript is that it is very hard for a developer to hide JavaScript code and to create secure data transfer between browser and server. It is always possible for someone to check XHR transfers and this makes data transfer very unsecure.

I had to deal this problem, because I had to develop sweepstakes application , which gave prizes to the user live. To make this happen I had to make secure session exchange between browser and server to synchronize FrontEnd and BackEnd.

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Writing modular and dependency based JavaScript

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Usually most of the websites are always using some kind of JavaScript to make them more interesting and modern. Occasionally this means animations, carousels, parallax scrolling and so on.

To create this kind of functionality, some developers are loading tens of JavaScript files separately and no further code or dependency organizing is done. It will be hard for other developers who have to maintain the code –  it is unreadable and scripts may easily overlap when creating new features.

This is okay for simple websites, but what happens when we are dealing with a large scale website, which has huge amount of different JavaScript files in various sizes ? Code is not organized anymore and it is hard to maintain. How to solve this problem?

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