Hi Hannes,
There were several reasons behind the switch.
- Cross browser nonsense: the application is an information platform with a specialized interface called Jigsaw. By 'specialized' I mean to say it doesn't look or act like a standard WIMP interface, so none of the standard libraries available can be used. Everything has to be made from scratch. In doing this we started to run into performance issues with some browsers, as well as compatibility problems. Smalltalk (we aren't decided on what dialect to use - Squeak, Pharo, etc) solves both of those problems. It is very easy to create a new interface paradigm in morphic, and the code will always run the same way regardless of platform.
- Security: It occurred to us that we had gotten swept up in the trend of making slick single page web applications without thinking first about whether or not it made sense to do so. Data security is important to the people (we hope) will use our software, and having things stored 'in the cloud' meant one of two things for us: 1) do lots of extra work to get all the necessary certifications to give users (like government clients and major institutions) a warm fuzzy about the integrity of their data -or- 2) find a way to allow the web app to securely access the client file system. Neither option is ideal, or really even feasible at this time. Moreover, even a user that doesn't require high-level security still may not want to sign up for yet another webservice. Therefore, we decided to pivot and create a desktop application and deploy that as the 'for free' version. It saves us a lot of headaches and it makes the user responsible for their own data. It also means we can create an enterprise edition that is not free that meets the needs of institutional clients. Also, the program image can be put in the 'cloud' so if the user wants to access the program from anywhere, they can.
- Smalltalk doesn't have the 'stank' Java has in the minds of users: While Java is a powerful and popular language that is easily uncoupled from the browser (and thus no more insecure than any other language), Oracle had made such a mess of things users are removing JRE from their machines because the perception is Java=bad. Using smalltalk gives us all the flexibility and power of a mature OOP environment without having to reckon with user resistance to installing the VM.
-------------------------------------- David Holiday neuburge@rohan.sdsu.edu (sent from my iPad)
On Oct 26, 2013, at 5:00 AM, beginners-request@lists.squeakfoundation.org wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Re: Reading PNG images into squeak image is slow (Levente Uzonyi)
- Re: [SPAM] Re: [Newbies] Reading PNG images into squeak image is slow (Mateusz Grotek)
- Re: Re: sandboxing a world (H. Hirzel)
Message: 1 Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 17:26:04 +0200 (CEST) From: Levente Uzonyi leves@elte.hu Subject: Re: [Newbies] Reading PNG images into squeak image is slow To: "A friendly place to get answers to even the most basic questions about Squeak." beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org Message-ID: alpine.DEB.2.00.1310251711200.1448@login01.caesar.elte.hu Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Thanks. I found a really bad bottleneck, and fixed some others in PNGReadWriter. I have uploaded my changes to the Trunk, you can find them in Graphics-ul.275. Loading any of the png images you've sent takes 1-1.5 seconds on my machine with the new version. They took 4-7.5 seconds with the old, so the speedup is about 4-5x, which might not be enough for you. You could achieve another 2.5x speedup if your images were in RGBA format (they are in RGB now), because that way the scanline can be converted to a Form without byte level manipulations.
Levente
On Fri, 25 Oct 2013, Mateusz Grotek wrote:
I just realized that it's one minute and nine seconds runtime for you. That's way more than what it should be. Reading an 1920x1004 non-interlaced RGBA png image takes less than 200 milliseconds for me using Cog.
Can you share the png image, so we can test it?
Levente
After you said that it's not normal behaviour I tried to reproduce it today.
- I cannot reproduce those 1 minute delays.
- I've downloaded fresh Cog
(http://www.mirandabanda.org/files/Cog/VM/VM.r2776/coglinux-13.33.2776.tgz) and Squeak (http://ftp.squeak.org/4.4/Squeak-4.4-All-in-One.zip) 3. I've got the following delays in one of my images with the fresh Cog: 0:00:00:41.598 0:00:00:26.942 0:00:00:36.862 0:00:00:32.338 0:00:00:38.316 3. I've got the following delays in the fresh Cog and the fresh Squeak image: 0:00:00:09.108 0:00:00:14.544 0:00:00:12.226 0:00:00:14.174 0:00:00:13.816 4. Still it's around 15 seconds. Image dependence is interesting because they seem to be the same versions (latest update: #12327).
uname -a Linux mglap 2.6.27.21-3.2-pae #1 SMP Wed May 20 03:21:35 CEST 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
cat /proc/cpuinfo ... model name : Genuine Intel(R) CPU T1600 @ 1.66GHz ... cpu MHz : 1662.478 ... cache size : 1024 KB ... bogomips : 3324.95 ...
And here are some photos:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/37119147/all.zip
And here is the application I use to read them in: a) Create an empty directory b) Unpack all.zip to it c) Filein Anotator.st d) Run it: Anotator new start. e) Open transcript e) Choose the directory with photos f) Klik lewo (left) and prawo (right) to move from one image to another (it will create some .txt files while doing it, so it may ask you if you want to overwrite) g) see the numbers in Transcript
If you don't want to run the whole app, just run: [PNGReadWriter formFromFileNamed: '/some/path'] durationToRun
Mateusz _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
Message: 2 Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 19:40:01 +0200 From: Mateusz Grotek unoduetre@poczta.onet.pl Subject: Re: [SPAM] Re: [Newbies] Reading PNG images into squeak image is slow To: "A friendly place to get answers to even the most basic questions about Squeak." beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org Message-ID: 526AACF1.5090908@poczta.onet.pl Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Levente Uzonyi pisze:
Thanks. I found a really bad bottleneck, and fixed some others in PNGReadWriter. I have uploaded my changes to the Trunk, you can find them in Graphics-ul.275. Loading any of the png images you've sent takes 1-1.5 seconds on my machine with the new version. They took 4-7.5 seconds with the old, so the speedup is about 4-5x, which might not be enough for you. You could achieve another 2.5x speedup if your images were in RGBA format (they are in RGB now), because that way the scanline can be converted to a Form without byte level manipulations.
Levente
Thank you very much!!!
Message: 3 Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 08:02:19 +0000 From: "H. Hirzel" hannes.hirzel@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Newbies] Re: sandboxing a world To: "A friendly place to get answers to even the most basic questions about Squeak." beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org Message-ID: CAGQxfVhD1d_+RVgL7iMT5_YVEWM_Dd+TiCmMqsHg5W6awX5yTw@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On 10/15/13, David Holiday neuburge@rohan.sdsu.edu wrote: Thank you everyone for your help! I've been looking at Squeak/Pharo for a few weeks because I've been creating a platform for knowledge workers to work with information that was going to be a javascript single page application.
For various reasons I think it makes sense not to have a 'web-based' app and was looking for a way to create a beautiful interface atop a powerful tool that I could easily deploy to whatever platform the user may have. This was the last concern I had, so I'm going to go ahead and start whipping up some awesome code.
David,
Just curious... what are your reasons to abandon going for a 'web-based' application in favor of a tool like Squeak?
Was it performance, the lack of IDE in JavaScript, the amount of data to deal with, something else? Does your Squeak app work with a server or is it a single tier app?
--Hannes
David Holiday
San Diego State University neuburge@rohan.sdsu.edu
Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
End of Beginners Digest, Vol 90, Issue 12