The effort on PersistentFan has led me to seek out various development/build/performance tools lately.
Some of the ones I found particularly helpful are:
- Minify/YUI Compressor – minimizing the number of HTTP GET requests for CSS and Javascript resources and the size (in bytes) of these resources can increase client-side (browser) perf. Matt Snider has a great post on how both to concatenate and compress resources via Ant.
- JSLint: Great service that analyzes your Javascript for code quality. Even better, RockstarApps has encapsulated JSLint to run as an Eclipse plug-in. Haven’t attempted to get this to run as part of the build (with Ant) yet.
- Page Speed – I tried YSlow (add-on to Firebug) but found Google’s tool to be better overall. Really helpful in determining the best way to increase performance.