Re:Swing - Good idea, badly implemented
on
Swing
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· Score: 2
All I can suggest is you use the source.;-)
Seriously, I bet you could probably find something out there by either doing a search, or subscribing to Java Developer Connection (at java.sun.com).
Re:Swing - Good idea, badly implemented
on
Swing
·
· Score: 2
Please don't compare Java to C++. It's not a simple vtable pointer.
Swing - Good idea, badly implemented
on
Swing
·
· Score: 2
The problem is swing is slooooow. Try a large-ish GUI written in swing. The inheritance depth in Swing is just too deep to make it fast enough for lightweight GUI components. Try it on a slow machine without JIT to see what I mean.
Personally I think this is a real hinderance to Java mainstream acceptance. I've tried a number of XML editors written in Swing, and just went back to Windows or X editors instead, because quite simply they respond. Even Tk apps respond better than Swing apps, because the widgets are implemented in C, not in Java with a huge inheritance tree. Interestingly I fear this will be the same problem that Mozilla and XUL face.
This is a shameless plug, but can I suggest you guys take a look at DBIx::AnyDBD. It's a module I wrote to greatly simplify making cross db perl DBI applications.
The basics are that you put all your db access methods in a Default.pm file (in the class hierarchy of your choosing). Then when you want to port to a new platform, anything that's different to your original development platform goes in [Driver].pm, where [Driver] is one of Sybase or Oracle or Pg, etc.
This has really simplified things for me on a cross platform development system, and I think it will for slashdot (and other systems) too.
Looks like the PS2 is going to do for 3D what the Amiga did for 2D back in 1984/5. Back then they had a revolutionary "Copper" which could spew 2d graphics faster than anything going (yes, I know it's a lot more complex and flexible than that, but this is slashdot...:)). I have a feeling that it's going to be an amazing couple of years, where we'll first see some fairly cool 3D games, and then gradually as developers figure out the Emotion Engine we'll start seeing some damned awsome 3D stuff coming out. Interesting Times (tm).
Also, it's interesting how ArsTechnica are becoming the "Byte" of the 21st century. I wish Byte would get back to these seriously in-depth technical articles.
Looks like the PS2 is going to do for 3D what the Amiga did for 2D back in 1984/5. Back then they had a revolutionary "Copper" which could spew 2d graphics faster than anything going (yes, I know it's a lot more complex and flexible than that, but this is slashdot...:)). I have a feeling that it's going to be an amazing couple of years, where we'll first see some fairly cool 3D games, and then gradually as developers figure out the Emotion Engine we'll start seeing some damned awsome 3D stuff coming out. Interesting Times (tm).
Also, it's interesting how ArsTechnica are becoming the "Byte" of the 21st century. I wish Byte would get back to these seriously in-depth technical articles.
You're missing the point of abuse of monopoly power...
You seem to think that MS bundling the browser for free was good competition for Netscape. But think about it a bit more... MS spent millions of dollars on IE development (after IE 2), to what - bundle it for free? This practice is called dumping. They dumped IE on the market, admittedly a comparable product to Netscape at version 3. This isn't healthy competition, it's anti-competition. It says "We've got billions of dollars to burn, and we're going to burn it until you're not in the market any more".
Did you people not read the findings of facts? It detailed these things in excrutiating detail. It covered internal emails saying just such things.
The facts of this case stand: MS used anti-competitive practices. Specifically in the netscape side of things: dumping. This is illegal. Companies who do illegal things require punishment of some sort. That's all.
First ever vector-based display engine for a GUI (Quartz)
Sorry, but Display Postscript (the foundation of the NeXT GUI, and now becoming available through ghostscript for GNUStep) was there much earlier than the very cool looking Quartz.
I do contract work for O'Reilly and Associates, I know they are currently looking for software developers. I live in Scotland:)
I have a 64k leased line to the 'net (very expensive here - ~ £350 a month), and we have weekly meetings by phone. I talk every day with my boss on AOL Instant Messenger ("Gaim" here).
So I guess that answers your question - it can work, given the right employer. Most employers I've met just aren't willing. And that's all it takes - the willingness to develop a relationship with your employees so that you can trust them to do the work. No special hardware or special secure VPN links (although ssh helps).
This will probably sound like an advertisement for Win2K, but I for one am tired of the unbased Win2K bashing on Slashdot.
I'm actually getting sick of hearing this. The very fact that your post got moderated up means that slashdot isn't a complete Linux troll central station. You proved yourself wrong.
If you don't want to see MS bashing posts, do as other sensible people do here and browse at +1.
And yet you go on to post here on slashdot a review of Windows 2000. What does that have to do with the topic? It should have been -1'd to death as off-topic.
Even more significant, you might be doing operations outside of the database (writing a file, sending an email) that if it fails, you need to roll back your DB transaction.
Transactions are essential. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never built a robust, scaleable system. Look at slashdot and you'll see what I mean:)
Sorry, but Sybase implemented transactions and sp's before MS bought the code base at around version 5 of Sybase SQL Server. The two projects forked at that point.
Microsoft used to supply Sybase with the DOS version of isql.
Sybase ASE is still IMHO a superior product to MS SQL Server.
What happened to dynamic reflow (or whatever you call it). I used to load slashdot in M13 (I think it was M13, maybe earlier) and it would progressively display as it loaded. Now it does the old Netscape thing of waiting for the last before displaying anything. Give me back my reflow!
Wow - amazing huh? There are some things you can do, like not using spawning CGI scripts (which you're not) and using persistent database connections (which you are), but short of that there's no shortcut. That's not to say there's nothing you can do though:
Ignore your application server vendor. They have to pass on some of the cost to Oracle, and they don't really manage Amazon.com with their product - but they probably do some small part of it so they can say that legally. I'm willing to bet that its the most unreliable part of Amazon.com.
Use well known, well respected, and evolved tools. These include things like mod_perl, Apache, Oracle, java servlets are getting there (but you saw that they don't scale fantastically, and their JDBC drivers are much slower than Perl's equivalent), but they just aren't that fast yet on large projects. AOLServer also looks like a fairly nippy option, but you need to use tcl to program it AFAIK.
Tune your database. This can't be stressed enough. It may take the rest of your life, but do it anyway. And if you can't do it, then hire a proffesional. These guys are expensive though - but you get what you pay for in this respect.
Split up your hardware. A separate DB and Web server can increase your application's speed no end due to removing contention for resources.
Cache! Cache whatever you can. If using something like mod_perl then stick the "Oops" proxy server in front of it to cache page accesses (there are good reasons why this speeds things up). Cache stuff in your server's ram. Cache stuff in shared memory.
Be ready to spend. Running a fast, large hits web site is expensive. There's no ifs nor buts about this unless you don't mind downtime. PhilG of "Phillip and Alex's" fame estimates something like $100,000+++ a year to run a web site like this, taking into account Oracle costs, support, DBA costs (yes, you do need one), hardware and network costs.
And read "Philip and Alex..." - even if you only get the web version - somewhere off http://photo.net. He debunks the myths of application servers and reducing the costs and time of development of this sort of thing. And read "The Mythical Man Month" - that also debunks the idea of reducing the time to develop complex things.
This is _the_ standard text on compiler writing. What the book contains applies today and will apply in 20, 30 years down the road. Some of my books from Uni I still go back to, because the basic principals still apply (for example, the ancient "Principals of Concurrent and Distributed Programming" is still applicable in many modern situations).
I knew I should have patented that idea when I posted the idea to the ICOA (Amiga developers) mailing list 2 years ago... damn!
Seriously though - this is what it's all about - if you don't like the tools the OS provides, you can write your own, instead of being stuck in GUI hell. This is how an OS should be.
You just need to complain to Sun to get a Java 1.3 implementation out of the door so that you can use JNI (or whatever the appropriate acronym is) to plug it into Mozilla.
I'm surprised I've not heard much about Oops. I'm trying to get it working here, unfortunately the documentation isn't great. However it does seem like the architecture would make it an extremely fast little proxy, and it seems to have most of the features of Squid.
If you look close at the two pictures: color and b/w you'll see that the color screen is quite a bit smaller (or it certainly appears to be to me - either that or the color palm is much bigger overall). That's got to suck readability-wise. I know it's quite comfortable reading a long text on my Palm V, but anything smaller would make it a real eye strain. Anyone got one yet who can give a review?
Password authenticated news works fine in the latest build. It does Java provided you have java 1.3. Most plugins are working via the backward compatibility layer.
The current problems with Mozilla as I see it for a daily browser are:
SSL isn't included (won't ever be in Mozilla?) There are still dynamic reflow issues. It still occasionally locks up with 100% CPU. Opening new windows is slow.
Other than those things, I've been using it for ordinary browsing as much as possible. It makes reading slashdot a breeze, since it reflows as the page is loading.
I worked for a while at an extremely large web site (in excess of 50m page views a day). Here's how they cope:
Distributed servers. Their content is served from several different servers around the world. Static content is distributed with a simple script that copies static content to other servers. I think this is only really necessary when your hits reach the scale of Yahoo (although it wasn't Yahoo I was working at).
shtml. Server side includes provided enough templating facilities to "get by" for most content.
No fluff. Cookies and javascript were mostly banned. You had to get extra special permission to use either.
Simple perl CGI. Although the content wasn't particularly dynamic, simple perl CGI's can go an awful long way, and often scale better than most people assume for simple scripts.
The questioner's comment though related to scaling <B>authentication</B> to 1m hits/day. So let's deal with that.
I'm pretty certain that mod_auth_mysql will provide enough for you. You don't need locking, transactions or any fancy facilities. So MySQL's raw speed will do you just fine. Handling dbm's for that many users or hits is just going to kill you.
If that doesn't work, consider writing your own authentication handler, either in C, or pick up mod_perl.
To all the other posters going on about how you need Zues or khttpd to serve that many hits - you obviously don't run a site taking that many hits. The benchmarks that show Zues faster than Apache show taking about 200 million hits a day. I don't know anybody mad enough to try and do that on a single server. The reality is that Apache provides the right level of stability and configuration options and speed to suit almost every site out there.
Before you dismiss Perl altogether as a friendly robust large scale programming language, I seriously recommend a read of Object Oriented Perl by Damian Conway. It's a truly awsome book which just brings together clean programming and perl. Something a lot of people didn't think was possible!
After reading it I built XML::XPath - an implementation of the XPath spec in perl. It uses lots of classes to do its work, and I feel it's coded very cleanly. And it remains pretty quick (Damian has a discussion of Perl's OO speed issues in the book). If you want to check it out see CPAN. If you don't or can't understand the code I feel I've done something really wrong.
That's fine if you know programming already. I can just picture an English lit graduate trying to learn programming from slash 0.9.1... hahahah:)
And besides that - theres an awful lot of crud code in the open source world (as there is in the closed source world - but you can't download and learn from that) and I'd hate to see someone learn object oriented techniques from that rather than a good book on the subject.
Slashdot Mirror
All I can suggest is you use the source. ;-)
Seriously, I bet you could probably find something out there by either doing a search, or subscribing to Java Developer Connection (at java.sun.com).
Please don't compare Java to C++. It's not a simple vtable pointer.
The problem is swing is slooooow. Try a large-ish GUI written in swing. The inheritance depth in Swing is just too deep to make it fast enough for lightweight GUI components. Try it on a slow machine without JIT to see what I mean.
Personally I think this is a real hinderance to Java mainstream acceptance. I've tried a number of XML editors written in Swing, and just went back to Windows or X editors instead, because quite simply they respond. Even Tk apps respond better than Swing apps, because the widgets are implemented in C, not in Java with a huge inheritance tree. Interestingly I fear this will be the same problem that Mozilla and XUL face.
This is a shameless plug, but can I suggest you guys take a look at DBIx::AnyDBD. It's a module I wrote to greatly simplify making cross db perl DBI applications.
The basics are that you put all your db access methods in a Default.pm file (in the class hierarchy of your choosing). Then when you want to port to a new platform, anything that's different to your original development platform goes in [Driver].pm, where [Driver] is one of Sybase or Oracle or Pg, etc.
This has really simplified things for me on a cross platform development system, and I think it will for slashdot (and other systems) too.
Mail me direct if you have any questions.
Looks like the PS2 is going to do for 3D what the Amiga did for 2D back in 1984/5. Back then they had a revolutionary "Copper" which could spew 2d graphics faster than anything going (yes, I know it's a lot more complex and flexible than that, but this is slashdot... :)). I have a feeling that it's going to be an amazing couple of years, where we'll first see some fairly cool 3D games, and then gradually as developers figure out the Emotion Engine we'll start seeing some damned awsome 3D stuff coming out. Interesting Times (tm).
Also, it's interesting how ArsTechnica are becoming the "Byte" of the 21st century. I wish Byte would get back to these seriously in-depth technical articles.
Looks like the PS2 is going to do for 3D what the Amiga did for 2D back in 1984/5. Back then they had a revolutionary "Copper" which could spew 2d graphics faster than anything going (yes, I know it's a lot more complex and flexible than that, but this is slashdot... :)). I have a feeling that it's going to be an amazing couple of years, where we'll first see some fairly cool 3D games, and then gradually as developers figure out the Emotion Engine we'll start seeing some damned awsome 3D stuff coming out. Interesting Times (tm).
Also, it's interesting how ArsTechnica are becoming the "Byte" of the 21st century. I wish Byte would get back to these seriously in-depth technical articles.
You're missing the point of abuse of monopoly power...
You seem to think that MS bundling the browser for free was good competition for Netscape. But think about it a bit more... MS spent millions of dollars on IE development (after IE 2), to what - bundle it for free? This practice is called dumping. They dumped IE on the market, admittedly a comparable product to Netscape at version 3. This isn't healthy competition, it's anti-competition. It says "We've got billions of dollars to burn, and we're going to burn it until you're not in the market any more".
Did you people not read the findings of facts? It detailed these things in excrutiating detail. It covered internal emails saying just such things.
The facts of this case stand: MS used anti-competitive practices. Specifically in the netscape side of things: dumping. This is illegal. Companies who do illegal things require punishment of some sort. That's all.
Sorry, but Display Postscript (the foundation of the NeXT GUI, and now becoming available through ghostscript for GNUStep) was there much earlier than the very cool looking Quartz.
Yes. subs now can have an attribute list, including attributes for thread safety, and lvalueness.
I do contract work for O'Reilly and Associates, I know they are currently looking for software developers. I live in Scotland :)
I have a 64k leased line to the 'net (very expensive here - ~ £350 a month), and we have weekly meetings by phone. I talk every day with my boss on AOL Instant Messenger ("Gaim" here).
So I guess that answers your question - it can work, given the right employer. Most employers I've met just aren't willing. And that's all it takes - the willingness to develop a relationship with your employees so that you can trust them to do the work. No special hardware or special secure VPN links (although ssh helps).
I'm actually getting sick of hearing this. The very fact that your post got moderated up means that slashdot isn't a complete Linux troll central station. You proved yourself wrong.
If you don't want to see MS bashing posts, do as other sensible people do here and browse at +1.
And yet you go on to post here on slashdot a review of Windows 2000. What does that have to do with the topic? It should have been -1'd to death as off-topic.
Even more significant, you might be doing operations outside of the database (writing a file, sending an email) that if it fails, you need to roll back your DB transaction.
:)
Transactions are essential. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never built a robust, scaleable system. Look at slashdot and you'll see what I mean
Sorry, but Sybase implemented transactions and sp's before MS bought the code base at around version 5 of Sybase SQL Server. The two projects forked at that point.
Microsoft used to supply Sybase with the DOS version of isql.
Sybase ASE is still IMHO a superior product to MS SQL Server.
What "Wah" probably means is that he's such a hooked up connected scr1pt1ng d00d that he only ever listens to MP3's.
:)
I hope his college sysadmin firewalls his ass out of mp3 land for good
Are there *any* users using these napster clones on thier own payed for network, or are they all on college (or company) systems?
What happened to dynamic reflow (or whatever you call it). I used to load slashdot in M13 (I think it was M13, maybe earlier) and it would progressively display as it loaded. Now it does the old Netscape thing of waiting for the last before displaying anything. Give me back my reflow!
- Ignore your application server vendor. They have to pass on some of the cost to Oracle, and they don't really manage Amazon.com with their product - but they probably do some small part of it so they can say that legally. I'm willing to bet that its the most unreliable part of Amazon.com.
- Use well known, well respected, and evolved tools. These include things like mod_perl, Apache, Oracle, java servlets are getting there (but you saw that they don't scale fantastically, and their JDBC drivers are much slower than Perl's equivalent), but they just aren't that fast yet on large projects. AOLServer also looks like a fairly nippy option, but you need to use tcl to program it AFAIK.
- Tune your database. This can't be stressed enough. It may take the rest of your life, but do it anyway. And if you can't do it, then hire a proffesional. These guys are expensive though - but you get what you pay for in this respect.
- Split up your hardware. A separate DB and Web server can increase your application's speed no end due to removing contention for resources.
- Cache! Cache whatever you can. If using something like mod_perl then stick the "Oops" proxy server in front of it to cache page accesses (there are good reasons why this speeds things up). Cache stuff in your server's ram. Cache stuff in shared memory.
- Be ready to spend. Running a fast, large hits web site is expensive. There's no ifs nor buts about this unless you don't mind downtime. PhilG of "Phillip and Alex's" fame estimates something like $100,000+++ a year to run a web site like this, taking into account Oracle costs, support, DBA costs (yes, you do need one), hardware and network costs.
And read "Philip and Alex..." - even if you only get the web version - somewhere off http://photo.net. He debunks the myths of application servers and reducing the costs and time of development of this sort of thing. And read "The Mythical Man Month" - that also debunks the idea of reducing the time to develop complex things.Good Luck!
This is _the_ standard text on compiler writing. What the book contains applies today and will apply in 20, 30 years down the road. Some of my books from Uni I still go back to, because the basic principals still apply (for example, the ancient "Principals of Concurrent and Distributed Programming" is still applicable in many modern situations).
I knew I should have patented that idea when I posted the idea to the ICOA (Amiga developers) mailing list 2 years ago... damn!
Seriously though - this is what it's all about - if you don't like the tools the OS provides, you can write your own, instead of being stuck in GUI hell. This is how an OS should be.
MacOS X is looking seriously interesting.
Dude, it's in there.
You just need to complain to Sun to get a Java 1.3 implementation out of the door so that you can use JNI (or whatever the appropriate acronym is) to plug it into Mozilla.
I'm surprised I've not heard much about Oops. I'm trying to get it working here, unfortunately the documentation isn't great. However it does seem like the architecture would make it an extremely fast little proxy, and it seems to have most of the features of Squid.
Anyone got any good stories about using Oops?
If you look close at the two pictures: color and b/w you'll see that the color screen is quite a bit smaller (or it certainly appears to be to me - either that or the color palm is much bigger overall). That's got to suck readability-wise. I know it's quite comfortable reading a long text on my Palm V, but anything smaller would make it a real eye strain. Anyone got one yet who can give a review?
Password authenticated news works fine in the latest build. It does Java provided you have java 1.3. Most plugins are working via the backward compatibility layer.
The current problems with Mozilla as I see it for a daily browser are:
SSL isn't included (won't ever be in Mozilla?)
There are still dynamic reflow issues.
It still occasionally locks up with 100% CPU.
Opening new windows is slow.
Other than those things, I've been using it for ordinary browsing as much as possible. It makes reading slashdot a breeze, since it reflows as the page is loading.
I worked for a while at an extremely large web site (in excess of 50m page views a day). Here's how they cope:
Distributed servers. Their content is served from several different servers around the world. Static content is distributed with a simple script that copies static content to other servers. I think this is only really necessary when your hits reach the scale of Yahoo (although it wasn't Yahoo I was working at).
shtml. Server side includes provided enough templating facilities to "get by" for most content.
No fluff. Cookies and javascript were mostly banned. You had to get extra special permission to use either.
Simple perl CGI. Although the content wasn't particularly dynamic, simple perl CGI's can go an awful long way, and often scale better than most people assume for simple scripts.
The questioner's comment though related to scaling <B>authentication</B> to 1m hits/day. So let's deal with that.
I'm pretty certain that mod_auth_mysql will provide enough for you. You don't need locking, transactions or any fancy facilities. So MySQL's raw speed will do you just fine. Handling dbm's for that many users or hits is just going to kill you.
If that doesn't work, consider writing your own authentication handler, either in C, or pick up mod_perl.
To all the other posters going on about how you need Zues or khttpd to serve that many hits - you obviously don't run a site taking that many hits. The benchmarks that show Zues faster than Apache show taking about 200 million hits a day. I don't know anybody mad enough to try and do that on a single server. The reality is that Apache provides the right level of stability and configuration options and speed to suit almost every site out there.
Before you dismiss Perl altogether as a friendly robust large scale programming language, I seriously recommend a read of Object Oriented Perl by Damian Conway. It's a truly awsome book which just brings together clean programming and perl. Something a lot of people didn't think was possible!
After reading it I built XML::XPath - an implementation of the XPath spec in perl. It uses lots of classes to do its work, and I feel it's coded very cleanly. And it remains pretty quick (Damian has a discussion of Perl's OO speed issues in the book). If you want to check it out see CPAN. If you don't or can't understand the code I feel I've done something really wrong.
That's fine if you know programming already. I can just picture an English lit graduate trying to learn programming from slash 0.9.1... hahahah :)
And besides that - theres an awful lot of crud code in the open source world (as there is in the closed source world - but you can't download and learn from that) and I'd hate to see someone learn object oriented techniques from that rather than a good book on the subject.