Trading speed for convenience

Monday, October 19, 2009, 10:04 AM
Code by (Article #246)

Something I've always been a bit dubious about is the tendency among web programmers to always favor speed. Now, I understand the need to avoid having giant loops of JavaScript code bogging down everyone who owns less than a Core i7. What I'm talking about is particularly that microsecond of server response time that many programmers refuse to sacrifice in the name of massively greater convenience.

I run all my websites off a single template file. That file has pseudo tags for things like the header, footer, sidebars and main content. Then, in PHP, I use regular expressions to fish out those pseudo tags and replace them with whatever dynamic content needs served to fill in the page properly.

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For you have something in the template file that looks like this (replace the brackets with lt and gt tags as needed):

[div class="content"]
[CONTENT]
[/div]

And the PHP code is going to look like this:

ereg_replace("[CONTENT]", $output, $template);

Is this is the swiftest approach? No. I probably wouldn't recommend running a website that gets 1 million hits a second this way. But, the vast majority of websites don't get 1 million hits a second. In fact, the majority don't get 1 million hits a day.

From my perspective, it's easier to build for convenience than it is for speed. Especially if that microsecond of response time doesn't win you much. I'd rather use template system that can be ported rapidly from website-to-website than a highly responsive system that requires serious digging to alter anything.

Also, frankly, when I look at the most widely used systems, such as Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla, my first thought is that they are coded neither for speed nor convenience. They're not easy to tweak. They're not peculiarly fast -- I mean, when you consider how many database calls the average Wordpress post requires just to serve a page -- ouch.

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Welcome!

Wonder where to start with your web design business?

This blog follows along with my efforts to build and grow a website design business, Pro Content and Design.

The goal of this blog is to fill in blanks that may be empty as you get your business rolling.

This blog, particularly the source code section, is not intended for beginners. If you are not comfortable with databases, Ajax, DOM objects and other advanced methods, I strongly suggest you go take a look over at W3 Schools before even reading -- let alone tinkering with -- any of the code here.

I hope this blog has some value to web designers as they attempt to get their businesses going.

Good luck, and happy reading.

Thank you,
John Crawford
Pro Content and Design