[TYPO3-dev] New icons to the core or to t3skin?

[Dmitry Dulepov]

Hi!

On 2010-01-28 15:04:27 +0200, Steffen Gebert said:
> That's exactly our plan.
> EM will be usable. Backend will have lots of the "meeep - this icon is 
> missing" symbols.
> But as the structure styles belong to the core, it will be usable.

That sounds ok to me.

> I see your reservations.. I am one of the advocators of "TYPO3 is 
> enterprise and it must be able to do everything itself".
> Maybe I should rethink. It's still undecided, when sprites will be 
> generated, as it's not coded, yet.
> Will think about it, on what factors the sprite generation depends and 
> in doubt discuss it in another thread.

Well, let me give an example... A couple of years ago I worked a lot of 
with enterprise Java. In the company where I worked, we developed a 
solution for one bank. It required several Sun servers each running a 
BEA WebLogic J2EE server (tons of money!!!). There were three phases of 
that project. Bank cancelled in the middle of the stage 2 because the 
solution was too heavy. They could not afford it because they had to 
add several servers from time to time to connect more customers to this 
system. The system was heavy because we did exactly that: do everything 
itself. There were no ineffective coding, we had caches, etc. It was 
all developed with best practices in mind. But it was too universal: it 
did everything even when it could use static data. We even had dynamic 
code generation. We could use static code in all these cases but we 
generated it because we wanted to be universal: you change the model 
and all code is regenerated at runtime. It was stupid. Dead product in 
the end. Died because of its own weight. RIP.

Since that time pefromance goes straight after security in my priority 
list :) Nobody will use the system if it is slow. People start shouting 
when they see "Page is being generated" and our Backend is already too 
slow to compete with any other PHP system out there. There is no point 
making it slower. It should be faster!

Therefore static generation of sprites should be a natural solution. It 
is possible to optimize them a lot with Photoshop to make them very 
lightweight. Just imagine: static files that are client–cache by server 
configuration. It will fly comparing to sloooooooooooooooooow 
generation of the same files.

It is cheap to use static files. It costs user's attention and feeling 
to generate such files.

As much as possible should be static.

Speed is one of the usability factors. Users like speed :)

Sorry for a long post. It is because I care as much as you do :)

-- 
Dmitry Dulepov
TYPO3 expert / TYPO3 core team member / TYPO3 security team member 
Read more @ http://dmitry-dulepov.com/