Get To Business.

The standards and requirements of web-based user interfaces have steadily risen in recent years, and heavy use of Javascript and sometimes AJAX is almost unavoidable in modern day web applications. However, developing with Javascript could be similar to pulling teeth - There’s a lot of bleeding and the pain won’t go away for several days (Incidentally, I had a tooth pulled out recently).

Javascript, unlike server-side languages such as PHP, are parsed by the browser, and is browser-dependent in its functionality and debugging process. As fate would have it, all browsers differ from each other in their implementations of Javascript parsing, often times even diverging on different versions of the same browser. And of course, there is also Internet Explorer, whose vile and unspeakable acts of Javascript terror are only surpassed by its level of adherence to Css standards.

For basic usage, plain old Javascript can still make do and create simple user-interface interactions. But when the user-interface requirements are high, and Javascript deployment is massive, other alternatives might be considered.
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Two weeks into the Octabox Alpha testing, we’ve released our first major update, Octabox v0.15.
Latest release didn’t include any new features, but rather was focused on improving performance across the board.

Up until this version we have been using the Prototype Javascript framework to handle client side scripting tasks, and the Script.aculo.us Javascript toolbox to handle User Interface widget implementation (draggable windows, animations and so forth).
These two are most potent and very mature code libraries - however, combined they weigh on the upper side of 200kb (full featured with no compression), which is a lot to download when latency is high for an http connection. After running those libraries through basic compression techniques (removing whitespaces and shortening variable names) we got it down to around 141kb. Major improvement, but still a lot. Unfortunately, the Prototype library is incompatible with more advanced regular-expression compression techniques, like the one used by Dean Edwards’ Packer (It is possible to use Packer on Prototype, but it requires tedious modification to the Prototype script file, and lots of debugging ensues). So, we’ve decided to migrate to the jQuery Javascript framework.

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