We use Basecamp for project management and their new interface is REALLY fast.
This got me interested: looking at its speed and based on some interface clues I concluded that it must be Ajax-based. Then I inspected the site with Chrome and my suspicion was confirmed: indeed the Network pane shows that requests are appended to the page requests and not completely reset as in standard page-to-page navigation.
But.
Ajax-based sites are most clearly given away by the fact that they have funky urls:
http://www.example.com/#page1
http://www.example.com/#page2
etc.
Yet in Basecamp it seems that the navigation is standard. Like this:
https://basecamp.com/accountid/project1
https://basecamp.com/accountid/project2
So which is it? Is the new Basecamp ajax-based or is it some new hybrid that I am not aware of? Is this a webserver set-up solution? Is this a programming language (maybe a Ruby) specialty?
Hope someone else is as excited about this as I am 🙂 Thanks.
These two recent blog posts by 37signals discuss how they got that “snap” into the new Basecamp:
How Basecamp Next got to be so damn fast without using much client-side UI
How key-based cache expiration works