Optimizing MobileFirst applications

MobileFirst Studio has several features we can use to reduce the size of the application or otherwise improve its performance or reduce its load time.

During development, the applications you develop can perform well. But when these apps are used by mobile devices, performance can be impacted by a number of factors.

The large size of applications can make initial download times from the Application Center too long for users. Inclusion of multiple JavaScript files in Desktop Browser and Mobile Web applications can require multiple requests to retrieve them when the app is started, increasing start time. Unused resources such as large images or unneeded files included in the generated Cache Manifest file can further slow start time for these types of applications.

MobileFirst Studio includes a number of features that can reduce the size of the MobileFirst web applications, such as minification or removing unused features such as JSONStore. It also includes features that can improve performance and user satisfaction by enabling them to start faster, such as concatenation and editing the Cache Manifest. These features are described in the following topics.

• Including and excluding application features
  If features such as JSONStore are not used in the application or in certain environments, we can reduce the application size by excluding them.

• Application cache management in Desktop Browser and Mobile Web apps
  MobileFirst Studio provides mechanisms by which we can control the contents of the application cache for Desktop Browser and Mobile Web environments.

• MobileFirst application build settings
  We can use minification to reduce the size of JavaScript and CSS files in the Mobile Web or Desktop Browser application. We can also use concatenation to improve the start time of the application. To do this, we use MobileFirst build settings.

• Minification of JS and CSS files
  Settings within MobileFirst Studio enable you to minimize the size of JavaScript and CSS files deployed with the Desktop Browser and Mobile Web applications.

• Concatenation of JS and CSS files
  MobileFirst Studio allows concatenation of multiple JavaScript and CSS files that are deployed with the Desktop Browser and Mobile Web applications.

• Optimizing MobileFirst applications for use over slow networks
  If the MobileFirst applications are meant to run under limited network conditions, we can follow these guidelines to build the applications and improve performance.

Parent topic: Develop MobileFirst applications