Thursday, November 20, 2008

Oracle Apex: Boost performance with a CDN

Ext has recently partnered with CacheFly, a global content network, to provide free CDN hosting for the Ext JS framework. See more details on the announcement.

A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users.
The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity.

For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen. i.e. using a CDN to deliver static content, such as Ext javascript, css and images will result in your pages downloading significantly faster.

I've modified my demo site on apex.oracle.com to see the performance difference. Previously I was pulling the Ext content from extjs.com - using the CDN gave a significant performance boost, making the demo site load much faster and give it a much snappier feel.

To implement was a snap, just referencing the Ext content in my Oracle Apex page templates from the CacheFly site:
 <script type="text/javascript" src="http://extjs.cachefly.net/ext-2.2/ext-all.js"> </script>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://extjs.cachefly.net/ext-2.2/resources/css/ext-all.css">
And if that isn't sweet enough, using the Ext’s Build It! tool will automatically install your custom version of the Ext library on the CacheFly website.

So after implementing, I wanted to see how much better my YSlow score was now I was using a CDN. Bugger - no difference - it wasn't detecting the CDN, so a quick check on why, and how to fix. Something to think about...

No comments: