I’d like my site to have a low-bandwidth option for users with limited access ( dial up - pay by usage). Does it make sense to use Menus and drop the icons ? Are there approaches that help with that in Vaadin ?
Thanks,
Keith
The biggest bandwidth consumer for most Vaadin applications is the initial download of the widgetset (client side Javascript engine). Most UI updates taking place after that are very small, only telling which parts of the page have changed in a compact format rather than reloading the whole page.
The most important optimization to reduce bandwidth usage is to enable compression on your server (if not already on by default), which helps all users.
GWT 2.0, which Vaadin 6.3 will use, has some optimizations that could make the compiled widgetset slightly smaller.
As for (a reasonable number of reasonably sized) icons, they are unlikely to be a major issue but if necessary, you could consider combining your icons into a single image using e.g.
SmartSprites
. This will increase the complexity of your build process somewhat, though.
Also, images loaded by the theme CSS and the application itself can contribute quite a large part of the download. In some applications this might be quite a bit larger part than the javascript. Thus keeping the theme simple and with as few and small images as possible could help the load-time.
Hi,
One more thought:
If you want to support both low- and high-bandwidth, with more bling for the high-bandwidth version, one way would be to create two separate themes. ThemeResources, CustomLayouts and CSS can be customized in each theme, so you get a lot of flexibility by using those.
Best Regards,
Marc
Thanks! All good concepts to try and keep in mind. Not everyone in the world as broadband access.
Keith