Optimization in web development can mean many things. Optimization, in general, means to speed things up. There are a number of areas where we can speed things up in PHP and jQuery development.
Throughout the book, we have already seen some examples of optimization, without using the word to define it. Here are a few of them:
Using plugins to provide functionality optimizes your own time, as you do not need to rewrite everything
Using JSON instead of XML optimizes bandwidth and also reduces the amount of work needed by the server and client as they translate the data into their respective native object forms
Using jQuery's Ajax methods instead of reloading every web page optimizes the user's experience, making interactions much snappier and faster
There are many other points, but these probably are the most obvious.
In this chapter, we'll look at some more methods to optimize your own time, and to make things even faster on the client.
We will look at:
Creating a plugin...