Oodle: Fail

I like reading Uncov, it almost always makes me smile. Harshness is fine its own right, but it's always better when mixed with technical harshness. So in that spirit, let's take a look at Oodle 2.0.

First, a disclaim: Oodle and eBay are (or at least were) partners. Obviously everything here is my opinion, and has nothing to do with eBay. I'm not going to comment on their business, just a few things I saw in a browser...

Now I came across Oodle because they are hosting a Lunch 2.0 in a couple of weeks. I got the Facebook invite from Terry, and started poking around Oodle. They've supposedly re-done their entire site and made it very Web 2.0-ish, hence the launch of "Oodle 2.0."  So what's the secret to their new UI? Let's find out.

I opened up Firebug on a page and saw 7 HTTP requests for JavaScript files. That seemed excessive. I started opening up each JS file that was coming across. Here's the start of the first one:

/*Copyright (c) 2007, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Code licensed under the BSD License:
http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt
version: 2.3.1
*/

Alright, so they are using YUI, at least they didn't re-invent the wheel here. I kept reading this file and one line 11 I see:

/*Copyright (c) 2007, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Code licensed under the BSD License:
http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt
version: 2.3.1
*/

Fail. But wait, there's more.  Starting at the end of Line 18 we have:

/*Copyright (c) 2007, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Code licensed under the BSD License:
http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt
version: 2.3.1
*/

I'm seriously not making this up. See for yourself: http://img.oodle.com/jaml/autocomplete/1196308267

Ok, so that file is pretty bad. What about the other six? Here is the contents of another JS file (see it live in all its glory at http://img.oodle.com/jaml/focus/1195340840) :

function focus()

{

	var focusElement;

	if (document.getElementById('home-what'))

	{

		focusElement = document.getElementById('home-what');

	}

	else if (document.getElementById('search-what'))

	{

		focusElement = document.getElementById('search-what');

	}

	else if (document.getElementById('email')) 

	{ 

		focusElement = document.getElementById('email');

	}

	else if (document.getElementById('sender'))

	{

		focusElement = document.getElementById('sender');

	}

	focusElement.focus();

}

addDOMLoadEvent(focus);

That's right, an HTTP request for 20-freaking lines of JS. FAIL! There was also three CSS files loaded for a single page. The ten combined external files are all loaded in the first 20 or so lines of HTML. It's like these guys are trying to make their site slow...

I looked at their house listings. You can click a "see details" for each listing and it makes a slick XmlHTTPRequest call. How very Web 2.0. The response to this is XML. What year is it? Haven't you guys learned about JSON? You would think using YUI they would have figured this out.

Here is one the URLs to a search: http://sf.oodle.com/housing/rent/home/-/bathrooms_2/bedrooms_3/bedrooms_4+/-/95118/+5/.
That looks very Ruby on Rails-ish (or maybe Django.) I looked at their cookies, including their session cookie, but nothing cried out RoR there. Still RoR would fit well with their slowness strategy.