A common problem for many developers is that they concentrate on efficiency issues too early in the development process. We suggest that the first priority of any web site is that it functions. If people can’t access your site or if the site is difficult to use and poorly designed, users aren’t going to care how fast it runs. ATG products can help you to build a site that runs fast, but testing for accuracy and functionality is more important. Since JSP is relatively easy to work with, performance optimizations can be considered after you stabilize basic functionality.
Working on the most used pages in the site should be another high priority. Obviously a page that people only visit if they sign up for a special promotion should get less attention than then site home page. Focusing on tuning the most popular pages in the site so that they run smoothly and load quickly makes your web site more attractive to users.
After your web site is up and running you can evaluate it and decide how to make it work even better. The rest of this appendix offers some suggestions on how to write JSP code so that it provides optimal performance for your site.
