Month: April 2012

How to make your Chrome browser work faster

Published on by Yakov Fain6 Comments

Any Web browser has local cache, and everyone knows that its goal is to minimize the number of network requests by caching locally some resources like images or even the program code. The google.com home page opens blazing fast? Sure, because the browser loads it from your disk cache, not from the network.
But let me question this holly grail of all Web browsers. Does local cache make your Internet browsing faster? I have two different ISP at this location. Take a look at the speed of my Verizon FIOS wireless internet connection produced by speedtest.net.

Optimum Online is my second ISP and below is their data. Both ISP show pretty respectable speed, aren’t they?

Now back to local cache. Being a Web developer, I use several Web browsers to make sure that my JavaScript (a.k.a. HTML 5) applications look good on four major browsers. A regular person may not know a little dirty secret of Web developers – they often turn off the cache to make sure that the Web browser will always pick a fresh version of the application being worked on.

Recently, I started using Google Chrome for personal Web browsing. It’s a nice browser, but I noticed that some Web sites started loading really slow. Cleaning cache often helped. So I decided to make a more radical move – I simply disabled cache once and forever. Man, my Chrome started flying!

If you want to try this experiment too, here’s how to do it. Click on the image of a little wrench at the top right corner of the browser’s window, and select Tools | Developer tools. The bottom portion of your window will show the panel depicting the guts of the Web page you’ve been looking at. Then click on the little round Settings icon at the right bottom corner of the page. It’ll open a new panel, where you can easily find the Disable cache option. Just do it and let me know if you’ve noticed the difference. The same trick should work with other Web browsers too – just goggle on how to disable cache in yours.

The Java Courseware

Published on by Yakov Fain4 Comments

If you are planning to do build a career as a software developer, you have to be prepared to get trained and re-trained every couple of years. But how? If you’re lucky, your employer will send you to classes, otherwise you have to spend substantial amount of time self-studying. Back in the nineties I was hungry for the courseware. Going through these thick manuals on hot technologies was the shortest way to master them.

Beside software developers, university professors and contract instructors are also looking for the courseware that would help them to teach the class without major surprises and failures in front of the students. No matter who you are, I’d like to offer you some extra materials that’ll help you in learning or teaching programming in Java and Java EE.

Last year, Wiley/Wrox has published my Java Tutorial. 24-hour trainer. It was already structured as lessons, had homeworks, came with video screencasts and included easily importable Eclipse projects for each lesson. Then, I created a supporting site where you can download solutions for the assignments. Some of my students offered interesting versions of the solutions and I let them upload their projects to the same site.

Then, I started eating my own dog food and taught a number of online Java training classes using this book as a textbook. While doing this I created presentation slides and used them in classes. These slides included new information and tons of links to additional studying materials. Today, I finished uploading the slides, and they are publicly available under the Wiki section on the site with solutions.

Enjoy your Java!

P.S. Currently I’m preparing the courseware for my upcoming one-day master class “JavaScript for Java Developers“. My colleague Victor is working on the materials for a fast track workshop on using the JavaScript-based framework called Ext JS. Any of these training classes can be delivered onsite at your organization.