The Power User Tools website is powered by an amazing Javascript library: ExtJS. And as I found out today, ExtJS has a CDN hosted by CacheFly, completely free!
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a series of hosts that let you offload the hosting of static files from your own web server. This is a big boon to PUT and The Waffleshop since our server is somewhat underpowered, and the ExtJS library is fairly massive (almost 1MB). Both the ExtJS team and CacheFly get a cookie for their support of open source software.
I modified PUT to use the ExtJS CDN, and made some other changes towards performance thate have dropped the load time (on an empty cache) from 6 seconds down to 2.
Edit: Feb 15, 2010 – ExtJS 3.1.1
The URL’s you can use for the CDN are as follows:
- http://extjs.cachefly.net/ext-3.1.1/resources/css/ext-all.css
- http://extjs.cachefly.net/ext-3.1.1/adapter/ext/ext-base.js
- http://extjs.cachefly.net/ext-3.1.1/ext-all.js
You probably won’t need any other files than that, but if you find that you do you then just download the release from the ExtJS website to find out the path of the file you need.