We have saved the most obvious for last. And why are forms and agents the most obvious place to look at performance? Because forms are what users spend most of their time working with, and agents leave a distinct trail that can be monitored and analyzed. What makes this section worthy of an entire book in its own right is that you can use so many programming languages in forms and agents, and you can write virtually unlimited quantities of code. So to speak of optimizing performance in forms and agents is to discuss the topic of generally good programming practices.

In this section, we'll cover some of the most important parts of your form or agent code in terms of performance. We'll look at common performance errors and how to address them. We hope these examples illustrate principles that can be applied to many more situations in your applications. Fortunately, our years of experience developing applications and troubleshooting for performance problems has shown that these...