Siu Lun

I’ve been looking into building a sample Facebook Connect app recently for experimentation and showcase use.

One thing I encountered in recent projects is the seemingly slow speed of profile images loaded via Flash.

The one thing that I’ve found that is a potential ‘bottleneck’ to this problem is the way Facebook Connect is used on the site.

Essentially the fundamental difference from our recent projects is that we used PHP client side library which proxies all information into the server before being served to client side. Facebook provides a javascript based implementation as well.

Based on the above information you can basically tell that proxying is a speed bottleneck and an inefficient way to present what’s essentially the user’s information to the user only. Javascript solves the issue as it is a request from the client’s browser to Facebook directly.

Based on this theory, it should be obvious that php client library should only be used if the server has to manipulate, store or doing any information processing before the information is presented to the end user. Javascript library should be used whenever information should be presented to the end user first.

I’m in the middle of proving this theory. Will update once result is known.

So I was telling you how great a image text replacement library Facelift is. However, I’ve been dealing with it in the past couple of hours as there was bugs in the beta files.

After taking a look at the codes and also at the forum over at Mawhorter.net, I don’t mean to be prejudice but the code is not great and the creator doesn’t seem to be fixing much of the bugs in good time.

A huge amount of coding has problems with it and a lot of people have contributed fixes.

Anyway, it’s a project that seems to be maintained when I feel like it.

Not to mention, this is the killer part, that Facelift is licensed under GPL v3. I don’t think GPL is suitable for any web programming libraries, it needs to be LGPL or lesser restrictive and viral ones. AFAIK it means if you use Facelift you have to also make ‘avaliable’ the rest of the coding. Which just doesn’t work well.

Someone should do a better version.

Later

Facelift, it’s nothing new, been out for a while now, but why blog about it?

For one, I just want to give it more coverage, because it is a great alternative to SIFR, the other font replacement technique used in today’s websites.

I don’t think I need to advertise it more, if you want more information I’m sure you can look it up yourselves.

I do want to document a problem however with Facelift as I’m using it for a project at the moment.

Facelift currently does not work with PHP 5.3. This is because PHP 5.3 has a bug that prevents it from operating properly. More specifically it is to do with the bounding box calculation used in the GD library. This bug is supposedly fixed in the latest SVN but PHP has not yet released a production ready fix yet. So we have to spray and prey for now.

Later