Hey guys, I'm currently in a rut trying to spin up my new website and I've distilled it down to using either jQuery or Redis. Which one is faster? Are there performance implications to watch out for? How complicated are migrations? Etc, etc. Am I missing anything else? What do you guys think?

PHP

Does PHP allow chaining? What about the memory overhead?

redis is definitely more flexible than php, but the downside is that you end up having to do a lot of your own indexing.

also, you can't chain on Redis, but you can multi, so...

Those both seem like reasonable choices, but Redis is faster (though Sho brings up a good point about indexing). Also, glad to hear you're thinking of an upgrade. Your current site is pretty meh, but I didn't want to say anything.

Can't you just do it all in PhotoShop?

This great feedback guys!

Sho, jQuery lets you access single nodes in a collection via an index.

Jean, do you have benchmarks? I heard jQuery has a lightweight memory footprint, and Redis can tend to hold way too much memory than necessary.

Dan, I tried this a few years back and although it was easy to maintain, it ate up all my computer memory. Remember, think speed.

if you really care about speed, have you thought about just going around jQuery and using query directly? I hear that Google uses queries extensively.

Right, query is definitely valuable but, without a cluster of Hadoop servers, it won't be any faster than native jQuery.

Ah, the never-ending native or non-native debate. Have you considered building it on a third-party platform like titanium? That way you get the best of both worlds. Build once, deploy everywhere.

Jeremy, Jean, my experiences with native jQuery has been fair to say the least. I haven't thought about Titanium. Can I still extend prototypes in that platform?

Arduino is a great prototyping platform. Perhaps you could use that.

Arduino is interesting, but I think if you're going to focus on any mobile platform it should be iOS.

Windows Phone 7 live tiles are pretty attractive though. Maybe we should get some designer input as well.

Don't dismiss PHP out of hand: it still has some legs in the ActiveX realm.

@dan I must admit I'm surprised by your preference for Arduino over Perl's 16-bit multi-core support.

I'm not super impressed with multi-core Perl. If you take the semicolons off of JS, it's about as fast.

@sho whitespace significance aside, of course.

Isn't javascript without the semicolons just coffeescript though?

In my experience, you wrap prototype methods in semicolons, but you'll only see real speed improvements when combined with jQuery. Redis on the other hand, and correct me if I'm wrong, removes semicolons altogether... something about the garbage collector. Sorry if that sounds silly, I'm still learning.

@dustin, you can avoid the garbage collector entirely if you cross-compile to IE which handles reference counts in the DOM.

@rael don't forget that you have to enable quirks mode first.

You'd need to use an object pool, old versions of IE6 run the GC every 256 object allocations.

@dan I'd understood that to be applicable only when specifying RGB encodings. Are you saying that CMYK Redis indexes behave with similar unpredictability? Does UDP-wrapping the handler make the whole thing more performant?

@dustin, controversial as this opinion may be, I might suggest that the application of a cloud-based Node.cgi cluster isn't too far out of bounds.

@dan, There's a flash plugin I'm using already that patches the IE6 bug you're talking about. I know it's a bit hacky, so to clarify, that's not at the top of my bucket list.

@rael, you've lost me there... CMYK is for print... so unless my users will be printing my posts.... oh, ok, i see where you were going with that. Clever.

@Jeremy, Redis patched quirks mode in v2 so it's a non-issue.

@dustin sprintf is for print, but I understand your confusion.

@dustin Ah, thanks, I didn't catch that in the changelog!

@rael If we're going to talk about cloud-based, we should really talk about whether it's a SaaS (software as a service) or PaaS (platform as a service) implementation of the Node.cgi cluster. There are lots of awesome PaaS providers these days who will not only run your cluster but also provide Github and Linux integration.

@jeremy, I'm skeptical about the interplay between Github and Linux w.r.t. IPv6 service-as-a-service integration.

Taking a step back from this rat-hole of technical comparison, and considering your original question. Have you considered using this revamp as a learning experience?

There a bunch of esolangs that are gaining traction. I saw that someone on HN wrote a node+express port in Befunge. You could also look at Whitespace. I'm pretty sure you could cross-compiling Whitespace to JS and CSS would be a productivity boon.

@dan "Have you considered using this revamp as a learning experience?" -- I thought that was implied, I apologize to everyone if that wasn't Obvious.

In either case, I'm trying to keep things fairly simple and the thought of introducing a cross-compiler somewhat frightens me. Plus I think it's generally a best practice to stick as close to the metal as possible (which is why I brought up jQuery because it's one of the few JavaScript libraries out there that doesn't introduce a large buffer between an implementer and an interface (sorry if that doesn't make total sense)).

@rael I'm familiar with the Github API... is there any historical evidence of other developers using the API to work around the issues you're talking about?