Reading this article and the recent DeviantArt post about page-load optimization (especially with respect to JS) makes me think there is a need for a standardized, scalable solution for page-assembling & loading. Something that would take into account things like ad networks, external JS, user-accounts, lots of small JS files used throughout the site, lots of small images, and backend services like memcached. Maybe the solution is not a standalone application or a new framework but rather a front-end JS library with a few backend modules in different languages (PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl).<p>Small sites spit out HTML from a couple of files/classes, large sites (e.g. your auto-insurance company) assemble a single HTML page using hundreds to even thousands of different files. Most large sites write their own HTML concatenator but as there is no standard or best-practice method, each one is organically grown and gets more and more complex over time. Now imagine being tasked with improving the pageload of a single webpage that calls 43 different backend services (mysql, vsam, ldap, memcache, soap etc.) across 600 different .php or .java files - you won't even know where to begin. MVC doesn't help much when you have 30 controllers calling 40 views and 20 models. The problem is there is no HTML pipeline.<p>Writing code to make a cube spin in 3D is easy using OpenGL. Making 100 cubes do the same isn't much more difficult either. This is because the graphics cards have a pipeline that you can fill using OpenGL commands in the right order. There is no right order for spitting out HTML, CSS, or JS and so everyone makes their own. Large sites already use some object-orientated say to echo "[div]blah[/div]" instead of hand-coding it. They just do it using their home-built solution. If there existed a standardized pipeline that different libraries, modules, and even web-servers could use, the optimizations described in the article would be nearly automatic.
For those interested, I got this browsing the Google Code Blog: <a href="http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/11/edmunds-partners-with-google-to-make.html" rel="nofollow">http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/11/edmunds-partners-with...</a>