Recently I updated the website. From now on the website uses jQuery. jQuery is a javascript library which makes the use of extensive javascript functionality much easier when developing a website. Before the website used the Ajax Control Toolkit, but I wanted to get rid of it.
The choice to replace the Ajax Control Toolkit by jQuery had different reasons. First I started to prefer jQuery, since it is very flexible and it works completely client-side. It is also easy to learn. Second I wanted to get rid of all the 'webresource.axd' files that are generated by the Ajax Toolkit. Often there are a lot, depending on what you use of the toolkit, and the counterpart is that they cannot be compressed. In the end I'm planning to use compression for the whole website with GZip, in order to decrease the traffic between the webserver and the browser, which makes my site faster.
Which functionallity has already been replaced on the website:
- The news items on the homepage are now fully clickable using an overlay
- It is now possible to vote on any news item. An Ajax call to the webserver saves the vote
- The slideshow has been replaced by a jQuery implementation
- Lightbox has been replaced by prettyPhoto
- The Ajax Toolkit popup has been replaced by a jQuery popup
The site uses jQuery version 1.4.2. The following plug-ins are used:
All javascript files now get minified and are served using a .Net Http handler. This is to reduce the number of requests to the webserver.
What I still want to replace is the validation logic on web forms. For this I want to use jQuery as well, in order to get completely rid of the last webresource files. If that is done I will be able to serve compressed pages from the webserver to the browser.
If this last part is done, the website will be completely jQuery ready.
Since all the stylesheets and javascript is served using an http handler, it can be that the site seems to fail here and there in displaying correctly. This is because the http handlers use cache. In this case it is recommended to release the cache of the browser. You can do this with a 'hard' refresh: CTRL + F5.
I hope you enjoy the changes.