Sophistication in Web Applications?

Posted by Cliff on Saturday December 11, 2004 @02:30PM from the what's-really-under-the-hood dept.

whit537 asks: "Anyone who uses Gmail for 5 minutes can see that it's a pretty dern sophisticated web application. But just how sophisticated? Well, first of all, the UI is composed of no less than nine iframes (try turning off the page styles in Firefox with View > Page Style). But then consider that these iframes are generated and controlled by a 1149 line javascript. This script includes no less than 1001 functions, and 998 of these functions have one- or two-letter names! They're obviously not maintaining this script by hand in that form. So do they write human-readable javascripts and then run them all together, or have they developed some sort of web app UI toolkit in Python? Does Gmail need to be this complex or is the obfuscation a deliberate attempt to prevent reverse-engineering? And are there any other web apps that are this sophisticated?"

1 of 197 comments (clear)

not simply obfuscation by Glog · 2004-12-11 14:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

I don't believe that the naming of the functions and variables is simply an effort to obfuscate the code. There is that, of course, but the main reason is probably to save money on bandwidth. When you have millions of people hitting your servers you can scrape quite a few bucks by removing white space and reducing the size of your files the way they have.