This is a cross post from the Wayfair Engineering Blog
Progressive Enhancement
is often described as an alternate approach to “Graceful Degradation” –
it encourages focusing on the most basic functionality first and then
building out from there. It also forms the core of the Yahoo! Graded Browser Support
model, which we use as a guide for our own rules around browser
support. This is an important topic, but it has been covered fairly
extensively in other articles,
so I’m not going to dive into it too much here. Instead I am going to
talk about specific progressive enhancement techniques we use at Wayfair
to improve site performance.
As you may know, there are some amazing
new features in HTML5/CSS3 that make web development easier – rounded
corners, drop shadows, gradients, placeholders in text fields, in
browser form validation, etc., all of which reduce dependency on
background images and JavaScript. These are great features to have, but
what about your IE 6, 7, and 8 users? How about older versions of
Safari and Firefox? IE 6, 7, and 8 users comprise over 35% of the
customers on www.wayfair.com, and we need to make sure that we give them a decent experience.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Switching from Classic ASP to PHP
This is a cross post from the Wayfair Engineering Blog
One of the big changes at Wayfair recently was moving all of our storefront code (well, almost all…we’re still working on our sessioned code) from Classic ASP (VBScript) to PHP. The company was started in 2002 and at that time ASP was a common technology on the web, and one that our founders were familiar with. After 8 years of working with it, we had pushed it to the limits and decided we’d get more benefit out of moving to a new technology.
Motivation for Switching
While ASP is still in extended support, as a language it hasn’t been actively developed for a number of years (I tried to find out exactly how many years, but my Google searches were fruitless, which might tell you something). It’s also a proprietary Microsoft language, so we were unable to make modifications ourselves, so any bugs we found were not getting fixed. ASP’s age also means that there are very few companies using it, so the community is small and there are basically no open source projects written in it that we can use. It was also getting harder and harder to hire developers with Classic ASP experience. While training people isn’t hard to do, we would rather hire experts who are going to help us squeeze every ounce of performance and functionality out of a language.
One of the big changes at Wayfair recently was moving all of our storefront code (well, almost all…we’re still working on our sessioned code) from Classic ASP (VBScript) to PHP. The company was started in 2002 and at that time ASP was a common technology on the web, and one that our founders were familiar with. After 8 years of working with it, we had pushed it to the limits and decided we’d get more benefit out of moving to a new technology.
Motivation for Switching
While ASP is still in extended support, as a language it hasn’t been actively developed for a number of years (I tried to find out exactly how many years, but my Google searches were fruitless, which might tell you something). It’s also a proprietary Microsoft language, so we were unable to make modifications ourselves, so any bugs we found were not getting fixed. ASP’s age also means that there are very few companies using it, so the community is small and there are basically no open source projects written in it that we can use. It was also getting harder and harder to hire developers with Classic ASP experience. While training people isn’t hard to do, we would rather hire experts who are going to help us squeeze every ounce of performance and functionality out of a language.
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