Eclipse Everywhere. Buah.

It’s been a little quiet lately. This is because I am working on a cute little project that I will be able to present soon. More when the time is ready.

There has been rumor lately that Zend (developer of PHP) will release a PHP Framework. This is nothing new, there has been a IDE (Zend ) for a long time now. But it will be based on Eclipse.

Also Macromedia announced that their new Flex 2.0 environment (Flashbuilder) will be based on Eclispe.

Why on earth Eclipse?! I think this is the most slowest IDEs available. It’s based on Java which makes it incredibly slow already and it’s so blown up that it’s unbelievable.

I just can’t understand why developers would use such a tool. I am not willing to buy a GHz monster PC just to have an editor running there. That’s a pure waste of money and electricity. Emacs is kinda slow already but it runs on a few MHz.

Can anyone explain to me why to use such a monster?

I thought that maybe everything changed for the better by now and downloaded the whole thing. That’s 100MB already. This already shows how much memory it will consume. Ok, I still started it. It took more than 2 minutes on my Powerbook G4. Hello? The features it provides are so not worth that.

I can recommend TextMate (best completition) and EditPlus (best integrated (S)FTP). These are fast, neat text editors. That’s what I want.

eclipse, zend, php, flex, textmate, editplus

Caching of Downloaded Code: Testing Results

Today I did some experimenting with the caching of downloaded code (or On-Demand Javascript, whatever you want to call it).

I’ve set up a small testing suite that currently tests 3 different ways of downloading code: script-tag insertion via DOM, XmlHttpRequest as a GET and XHR as a POST.

These are my results for now:

Method IE6 Firefox 1.07 Firefox 1.5b2 Safari 2.0 Opera 8.5
script_dom cached cached cached cached cached
xhr_post not cached not cached not cached not cached not cached
xhr_get cached not cached cached not cached not cached

(Results are the same for Win and OS X where both browsers are available (FF & Opera))

Safari Code Downloading Cache Test

This gives an interesting picture: Firefox does not seem to cache any scripts, neither the ones loaded via DOM nor those loaded via XHR. Only IE loads an XHR GET request from cache.

I’ve got the script in my public testing area, so you can test it for your own browser. Please do so and correct my values if you receive different results.

The sources of my tests are available, too: index.phps and js.phps. I did my testings using the latest prototype.js library. Maybe I will try it later on with another library (e.g. with dojo.io.bind).

I’d be interested in more ways to download code (especially via document.write since I haven’t been able to include this properly to my tests) and in your results for other browsers. Just leave a comment.

UPDATE: I have now included the Expires header field with the Javascript file. Now FireFox in both version caches the script with script_dom, in version 1.5b2 it also caches XHR with GET requests.

XmlHttpRequest, caching, prototype.js, test