Book recommendation: “CSS. The Missing Manual”

I have enjoyed this book: “CSS. The Missing Manual” and would recommend it to those looking for learning CSS.
There are a lot of hands-on exercises that go along with the instruction.
Have a nice reading.

Book recommendation: "Even Faster Websites"

This is the second book for the "Web Sites Performance" that I have read after finishing "High Performance Web Sites". This second edition (the second part by the same author) offers additional rules for speeding up the loading of a web page and responsiveness. Even Faster Web Sites presents 15 more rules that the author Steve Souders has developed from his work as a web operations manager at Yahoo! and Google. This book is completely practical and easy to understand and apply.

After these two books I can start investigating what could be improved with APEX applications performance.
Will see ... ;)

Book recommendation: "High Performance Web Sites"

At this moment I'm not sure about APEX performance but I think that after a few web architecture optimization tasks, it would work faster. But before that, I decided to invest some time into "Web Sites Performance" science and to find out what could be done better within the APEX platform ;)

I've read a very good, yet thin, (only 135 pages) book High Performance Web Sites which demonstrates that 80% of the time takes for a web page to load is due to an inefficient browser activity, and the book provides 14 rules for reducing the response time from 20% to 25%. And here is the 14 optimization rules:

1.Make fewer HTTP requests
2.Use a CDN
3.Add an Expires header
4.Gzip components
5.Put CSS at the top
6.Move JS to the bottom
7.Avoid CSS expressions
8.Make JS & CSS external
9.Reduce DNS lookups
10.Minify JS
11.Avoid redirects
12.Remove duplicate scripts
13.Turn off ETags
14.Make Ajax cachableand small


In my opinion, every APEX or any Web developer should read this. But if you do not have time to read you could at least try this software: YSlow

Understanding Concurrency and Concurrent Users

I have found a very nice and easy video about concurrency in the IT systems.
So, before you decide how many Concurrent User your APEX server will be able to handle, just watch these two videos:
Concurrency and Concurrent Users

This instructional video from HP explains the characteristics of “concurrency” as it is used in the context of performance testing and designing a load test.

Debugging mode and 404-not found

During the Apex development, it is very good to have additional information about the error: "404-not found page".
Read this Troubleshooting the 404-not found error on XE and enable dubug mode.

Checkbox nightmare

Before you code something with Web checkboxes, you should read the post on a simple checkbox explanation by Dimitri Gielis Checkbox in APEX
In addition, you could read Apex documentationas well.
And only after this short (two stories) reading, you will probably spend less time with checkboxes configuration than I did :).

Simple e-mail validation function

Nice and very simple pl/sql e-mail validation function from: http://forums.devshed.com/

if owa_pattern.match('email.address@server.com', '^.+@{1}\w+\.{1}\w{2,3}$') then
   /*matches*/
else
   /*not matches*/
end if;

Just create validation function returning boolean:

declare
begin
return
owa_pattern.match(:P27_EMAIL, '^.+@{1}\w+\.{1}\w{2,3}$');
end;

On this blog I will present my Oracle APEX journey to the world of Internet services and I will share as many knowledge as possible ;)
For now, you can see on-line, how does it works:

www.the3time.com
www.d3time.com


See you soon,
Algis