When people think of optimization, usually what they think of is ways to make the client-side script faster or ways to speed up the display of the page.
But, before the application gets that far, you need to write it. Here are a few tips for helping with parts of the development.
The most important thing that any developer can do after completing a project is to look back and see what can be re-used for other systems.
This usually involves taking something that is specific to a task, and making it a little more general.
Looking back through this book, an example of this is the code we wrote in Chapter 4, Forms and Form Validation, to handle very large select boxes.
To recap, the problem outlined was that forms sometimes have very large select boxes to handle things like lists of pages, lists of countries, and so on. However, in many of those cases, the select box will not need to be changed. You might have opened an edit form to...