TIdHTTPServer seems to be ignoring connections sometimes - delphi

Using Delphi XE6, I've written lots of service applications that use TIdHTTPServer. Every now and again, a javascript file will fail to load in Firefox, and when I check the Delphi application's log, there's no mention of it.
Example:
In TIdHTTPServer.OnCommandGet, first thing I do is log the requested page. After the page loads in Firefox, the log shows the page request, 3 CSS requests and 3 JS requests - for this example it is correct. But sometimes, and it's usually after I haven't requested the page for a while, despite closing Firefox, and the Delphi service application, one of the JS requests is missing, and it's not loaded in Firefox, so things don't work.
Not sure if it's relevant, but one of the techniques I use is appending the file's last modified timestamp code as a parameter when requesting the file.
eg. in the HTML, it will say <script type="text/javascript" src="general.js?rnd=20150522155113"></script>
I do this to ensure updates to JS and CSS files are always reloaded and not cached.
I'm not sure how to go about solving this. The issue affects multiple delphi projects. I only use Firefox, so not sure if other browsers are affected. Any help is appreciated.

Related

Performance in MVC web application

I am struggling to get some performance in my MVC application.I am loading a partial page (popup) which is taking hardly 500ms. But each time the popup loads it also downloads 2 jQuery files as well.
is it possible to use the jQuery from cache or from parent page?
I have attached the image in red which shows 2 additional request to server.
In order to improve the performance you can try with the following approaches:
see if your application server supports GZip and configure the application/server to return the responses always archived in Gzip
Use minified version of JQuery
there are also Packing libraries where you can pack all the imported resources, such as CSS files and JS files, and the browser will do only 1 request per resource type. For instance, in Java we have a library called packtag.
In general, I recommend you using Google Chrome browser and its performance analyzer. It will give you good hints.
In the Bundle config use this code
BundleTable.EnableOptimizations = true;
and also indclude both files in single bundle.
Does the popup use an iframe or does it's content just get added to the DOM of the current page?
If it gets added to the current page you could try just adding the script references to the parent page instead. It might not always be the best idea if the parent page has no need for those two files, but if the parent page also uses the jQuery validation then the popup will be able to use the parent's reference to the script file.
For an iframe I'd suggest looking at Gzip and minification to make the scripts load faster.

Firefox Demands Absolute URL For Referencing Stylesheet

I just spend the last few hours debugging a huge problem, the problem being,
My external css style sheet were not loading when I used Firefox.
Using Firefoxes debugging tools I was able to conclude that the file was not been found, it had nothing to do with the MIME type or encoding as I checked.
I was using relative URL's to reference my style sheets to I decided to use absolute and it worked! after hours of nearly losing my mind.
However using absolute URL's on every page is just a pain and not practical if I am debugging on localhost all the time.
Could anyone tell me why I need to proved the absolute URL's? The CSS file is there and Firefox states the relative URL and when I go to it manually, it works, however Firefox will just not find it. Every other browser including Chrome and Safari Works with the relative URL's.
I could use php and define all these relative URL's and then reference these within my HTML making it easier to switch domains for debugging but still its a pain and I don't know why I have to do this.
My site here
Thanks in advance,
Jack.
Note : For testing reasons I am giving the link to my site which I am having problems with, nothing to do with advertising.
For your stylesheet problem: change the backslash to a forward slash in your <link> element.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/main.css">
There are a couple of images with a similar problem.
You have a number of other errors: <script> tags between <head> and <body>, and some loose </article> tags as well
If you're using Firefox, take a look at the page source and fix anything you see highlighted in red. Then try again.

Google Analytics MIME type issue in Chrome using Rails 3

I'm adding GA to a Rails 3 app, which would normally be extremely simple, of course. I've added the GA JS snippet, which is rendering just fine. Everything works perfectly in Safari. In Chrome, however, it's giving me a console error: Resource interpreted as Script but transferred with MIME type text/html: "about:blank", pointing to the JS line that loads the ga.js file: s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s). Some things I've investigated:
I created a plan HTML page with the JS snippet, and it loads outside Rails in Chrome with no error.
The same HTML page, when put in /public, gives the error above.
The same HTML page, loaded in Safari from /public, doesn't give any error according to Firebug.
I tried the GA Debug extension in Chrome, but it remains silent, because ga.js isn't getting loaded.
Looking at the developer console in Chrome, I see a request for "http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js" that seems to stay in "pending" state, and a redirect to "about:blank" seemingly initiated by http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js, which makes very little sense.
So this seems to be related to Rails (since the snippet works in the HTML outside Rails), and doesn't affect Safari, but other than that I'm stumped. Hopefully I've just been staring at it wrong, and someone else will point out the obvious to me...? Anyone come across this before? Any ideas will be very much appreciated.
Came across this issue myself. "Disconnect" disabled share buttons on my site (g+, twitter and fb). Had to remove it to view the site properly.

Merged CSS Fails In Firefox

In order to dramatically reduce the number of HTTP requests on my ASP.NET MVC website, I am programmatically merging the files.
Essentially, I have an MVC URL http://localhost/Optimisation/JavaScript/ that calls my controller. The controller reads the javascript files in a certain order, merges them into a single output and renders it on a view.
This works fine.
I am implementing the same concept for the CSS now, using http://localhost/Optimisation/CSS/ - this merges a number of CSS files in a particular order and renders it onto the view.
This works in internet explorer, but in FireFox the styles are all absent. When I "inspect" the CSS file using FireBug it says that the file is empty. The same technique works perfectly in Internet Explorer, so the code behind is working - and if I browse to http://localhost/Optimisation/CSS/ using FireFox, it shows me the raw CSS that I've merged.
I'm referencing the optimised CSS like this:
<link href="http://localhost/Optimisation/CSS/" type="text/css" rel="Stylesheet" />
Make sure the server is sending it with a content-type of text/css.
I think Firefox will put a warning in the error console if it's not (or you can just look at the headers with your tool of choice).

Rails and javascript cache

I'll start to develop a new app that uses a lot of heavy js librarys (prototype, scriptaculous, tinymce and so on).
Someone told me to make all the app using ajax, so all the js files will be loaded only once.
My question is, I really must do everything on ajax?
Lets say if I call myapp.com/projects and projects use all those js files, then I click on a "show" link and I'm redirected to myapp.com/projects/1 on this redirect, all js will be reloaded again?
No, your Javascript files will not be loaded again, they will be cached on the client.
But yes, your application will need to check with the server at every page load, the server often responding that the scripts have not changed. By using AJAX, you reduce the number of connections to the server. You can reduce the number of connections by concating all you Javascript files into one.
Note however that AJAX will add some new problems, like forcing you to track memory leaks as your application will never unload its objects if you never reload a new page.
If you are not at ease with Javascript, I strongly suggest sticking with the "old" model of reloading the page everytime. If you have performance issues, you can deal with them later.
Reloading Images, Scripts, etc...
Short answer: yes
Long answer: depends
When you view a page, your browser will request the HTML, once it has the HTML it will start to load external references (images, scripts, etc...). When it goes to request an image or a script, your browser may send a header which says when it got it last and stored it in its cache. The web server may respond with a 304 Not Modified code which tells the browser to use the cached version saving it from downloading it again.
Even if the browser doesn't use these headers, it will still be caching, it just won't know when the cache should expire. When you use the rails helpers to include images and scripts, it will append a number onto the end of the url which is unique to scripts contents. So if you change the contents, a new url will be used forcing the browser to get the updated version.
Use Google's Ajax Libraries API! Google now hosts the most popular js libraries including Prototype, Scriptaculous and jQuery. Once they host a specific version they are committed to hosting that version indefinitely.
There is a small Rails plugin by Ryan Heath at github:
script/plugin install git://github.com/rpheath/google_ajax_libraries_api.git
Then in your views instead of using the default
<%= javascript_include_tag :defaults =>
use this instead:
<%= google_jquery =>
<%= google_prototype =>
<%= google_scriptaculous =>
You can specify versions if you want. Check out Ryan's readme at github for more information.
This way you don't have to bother setting up an asset host (at least not for your standard javascript) and save yourself a truckload of bandwidth!

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