Kameleoon shrinks script size by 30% by switching to TypeScript, ensuring seamless, fast user experience

June 18, 2020

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3 min

Lauréline Saux

Laureline is Content Manager and is in charge of Kameleoon's content. She writes on best practice within A/B testing and personalization, based on in-depth analysis of the latest digital trends and conversations with Kameleoon's customers and consultants.

At Kameleoon, we are committed to continually improving our A/B testing and personalization platform to deepen the benefits for our customers.

As part of this we have just released a major update to our solution, reinforcing its position as the best-performing optimization tool on the market.

1 Moving from JavaScript to TypeScript

Central to the new release is a switch from JavaScript to TypeScript within our engine code, which has also been substantially rewritten, adding new features and optimizing existing ones.

Designed for enterprise applications, TypeScript is an open-source programming language that adds functionality to JavaScript. TypeScript programs compile to JavaScript for both client-side and server-side execution.

2 The benefits of switching to TypeScript

Switching to TypeScript delivers multiple benefits for our customers:

30% smaller scripts to improve execution speed

Scripts deployed on visitor devices by sites using Kameleoon to deliver testing and personalization are now 30% smaller, at 30.7KB – under half the size of some rivals. This improves execution speed and the visitor experience, enabling brands to deliver seamless personalization and testing without any performance impact on visitors.

More robust code to avoid bugs

The nature of TypeScript makes it easier to write bug free software, so the robustness and quality of the code within the platform has also increased. At the same time everything within our engine was modularized and rewritten to further improve performance.

Reduced development time

Adding new code to the engine is now easier than ever, which means that development time for important features will be greatly reduced - especially around custom developments for clients.

At Kameleoon we are dedicated to ensuring our clients can deliver the most powerful personalization and testing programs to benefit the user experience, engagement and conversions. Our latest upgrades further improve our market-leading performance and functionality, helping our clients benefit when putting personalization and experimentation at the heart of their digital strategies.

Frédéric De Todaro

Chief Product Officer, Kameleoon

3 Further improvements to Kameleoon

The latest update to Kameleoon also brings multiple customer benefits:

Move to beacon calls

This drastically reduces the number of network calls, improving performance for clients who run a large number of experiments and personalizations.

Flexible consent management

Clients can easily define different levels of consent to respect privacy and meet all possible use cases and constraints under regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA. Read more about this feature in our blog post.

The latest update follows the introduction of a series of new features, including our Chrome Extension.

I am glad Kameleoon has switched to TypeScript as we are already users and it brings lots of advantages - speed is definitely one of them. We can’t imagine working without it anymore. The new code editor and Chrome Extension are also game-changing features as they provide big steps forward for developers. We are still exploring the possibilities and features of Chrome Extension but it offers a large amount of information and insights into running tests, goals and data.

Henry Münster

Product Manager Testing & Senior Software Engineer

As always all existing Kameleoon users will be automatically upgraded to the latest version of the platform - if you have any queries please contact your customer success manager or read our technical documentation.

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