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I know this sounds a little bizarre, but there is a very simple application I want to write, a sort of unique image viewer, which requires some interactivity with the host system at the user level. Simplicity when developing is a must as this is a very small side project. The project does require some amount of graphical work and quite a bit of mouse based interactivity (as well as some keyboard shortcuts), but quite frankly, I don't want to dig my hands into OGL for something this small. I looked at the available options, and I think I've narrowed it down to two main choices: Webkit (through either QtWebkit or WebkitGtk), and the language Processing.
Since I haven't actually used Processing but I do have some amount of HTML5 canvas and Javascript experience, I am somewhat tempted to using a Webkit based solution. There are however, several concerns I have.
How is Webkit's support for canvas, specifically for more graphically intensive processes?
I've heard that bridging is handled better in QtWebkit than WebkitGtk. Is this still true?
To what degree can bridging actually do? Can a Webkit based application do everything that an application which interacts with the files on the system needs?
Looking at Processing, there are similarly, a couple things I'm wondering.
Processing is known for its graphical capabilities, but how capable is it for writing a general everyday desktop application?
There are many sources that link Processing to Java, both in lineage as well as in distributing applications over the web (ie: JApplets). Is the "Application Export" similarly closely integrated with Java?
As for directly comparing the two, the main concern I do have is the overhead of each. I want the application to start up as snappy as possible, and I know that Java has a bit of an overhead regarding start up because it first has to start up the interpreter. How do Processing and QtWebkit/WebkitGtk compare for start up?
Note that I am targeting the Linux platform only.
Thanks!
It's difficult to give a specific answer, because you're actually asking a few different kind of questions - and some of them you could be more precise.
Processing is a subset or child of java - it's really "just" a java framework with an free ide that hides the messy setup work of building an applet, so that a user can dive in and write something quickly without getting bogged down in widgets and ui, etc. So processing can exist by itself and the end user needs to know nothing of Java (except syntax - processing is java, so the user must learn java syntax).
But a programmer who already knows java can exploit the fun quick nature of processing and then leverage their normal java experience for whatever else is needed - everything of java is in processing, just a maybe slightly hidden (but only at first) It's also possible to import the processing.jars into an existing java program and use them there. See http://processing.org/learning/eclipse/ form more information.
"how capable is it for writing a general everyday desktop application?" - Not particularly on it's own (it's not made to be), but some things are possible and easy (i.e. file saving & loading, non-standard gui, etc.), and in some ways it's similar to old school actionscript or lingo. There is a library called controlP5 that makes gui stuff a bit easier.
Webkit is another kettle of fish, especially if you aren't making a web-based thing (it sounds like you're thinking on using the webkit libraries as part of a larger program. I'll admit I don't have the dev expertise with those specific libraries to give you the answer you really want, but I'm pretty certain that unless you have programming experience beyond html5/javascript you'll probably get going much faster with processing.
Good luck with whichever path you choose!
I want to compare the performance of some web frameworks (Ruby on Rails and ASP MVC3) but I don't know how to get started... Should I measure how fast each framework renders e 10k long loop or how fast its renders 10k lines of html? Are there maybe programs that can help you with this? Also how can the server load be monitored? Any help is appreciated!
Thijs
With respect, this is an unanswerable question. Is a Porche faster than a Prius? Well, no, not when the Porche is in the shop :-).
The answer depends on what you're trying to accomplish, how you do it, and how you code it. For example, Rails goes out of its way to transparently cache as much as it can, and then makes it trivially easy to cache stuff on your command. Of course there's a way to do the same in ASP MVC3, but is it as easy?
Can you find, hire, and train a suitable team in that knows how to use the framework? What's the culture of the organization (Windows or Unix?). I could write a really fast application in MS-Access and the same application poorly in Rails against a high-performance database and the MS-Access app would win. It's far from a given that an application will be written well, optimized, or whatever.
These days, a well-written application is typically performance bound on data I/O, and if this is the case, then it's which database you use that might matter. The loop-test you propose would test almost nothing, unless you're writing an application that calculates pi to the billionth place, or something.
I am sure there are published benchmarks of application frameworks available, but again, they need to make assumptions about what the application actually has to do.
The reality is that any reasonable framework (which includes both of the two you mention) is likely to be as fast as necessary for most scenarios, and again, what you do, and how you architect and implement it are the far more likely culprits for performance problems.
Once you do choose, there's a great (awesome) tool called NewRelic RPM which works with several frameworks -- I use it with Rails, and it gives you internal metrics at a level of detail that is beyond belief.
I don't mean to be glib, or unhelpful. But this is a little bit of a sore spot for me -- in so many cases people say "we should use foo instead of bar because foo's faster", and weeks go by as bar is replaced by foo. And then there are little incompatibilities. And an unexpected bug. And then, well, for some reason the new one is a little slower. And then after it gets optimized, it's finally just as fast.
I'll step down from my soapbox now :-)
I have worked a lot on improving how my code runs (and it's "beauty"), but when is the time to stop fixing, and start working on the UI?
Microsoft (in my opinion) seems to go with the nice-code, while Apple goes with nice UI (although Apple's developer examples do have very nice code).
I'm bad at balancing, when is it the time to work on one or the other?
Make it work, then make it elegant, then make it fast.
If the user doesn't like the program, the quality of the code is irrelevant. Once the user likes the program, then code quality becomes more important. And by "like" I mean a good user experience where the program doesn't crash, fulfills the need that the user has and adhere's to the Principle of Least Surprise.
Note I say "more important" because code is not something the user sees or is interested in. Code quality and "beauty" is important to developers because it's what they see of the program and what they hand over to other developers.
I remember reading something some time ago comparing (in general terms) software developed for the windows platform and software developed for OS X. In general terms it said that windows programs tended to be developed by developers who didn't spend too much time on the UI or thinking about the user experience. Their concentration was getting every piece of functionality they could think of into the program without any thought about it making sense. Mac OS X on the other hand tended to be developed by people concentrating on the user experience first and solving their problems. So it didn't necessarily have as much functionality, but what it did have was directly associated with what the user needed and was easy to use.
So when is it time to stop and think about the UI? The fact that you have asked the question makes me think it's time to stop right now. If anything I'd suggest that even before writing any code you should have drawn out a basic UI and worked out what sort of user experience your program is going to provide If you cannot work that out, you don't want to wasting time writing code because you will never use it.
Thats not to say I think code "beauty" is irrelevant. I spend time on making sure my code is well written, easy to follow and looks "good". But that's after I've figured out the UI and because I've had a lot of experience with cleaning up other people aweful code :-)
This is an incredibly broad question, and the answer is entirely a function of what you're building, why, and for whom.
Some random bits of conventional wisdom that I agree with:
If you're building broadly-applicable consumer software (e.g. for Mac or iOS), then the UI is a critical component of the application. Spend lots of time on it. :) Work with designers. If your software looks like crap, no one will want to use it. (Assuming nobody's going to make them: see next point.)
If you're building internal or enterprise tools, UI polish is probably less important.
Even if you're a one-man (or woman) operation, think of engineering as distinct from "product management". Product management is the thought process that determines what the software should do, and how it should work (and look). Engineering creates the reality, but has different tradeoffs. These are sometimes in conflict, which is hard to handle if you're one person, but try to wear different hats.
In all cases, your code should work, for some reasonable definition of work.
If it's ugly because it's hacked together, you're likely to run into accuracy/correctness problems sooner than if you construct it methodically. It will also be harder to maintain. The tradeoff here is almost never worth it. As you gain experience, you'll more naturally write clean code from the start, even if it's "scratch" code. You'll save time in the long run this way, and not be faced with later wholesale attempts to improve its beauty.
If you're on a team, or working with others, clean code is even more important. Find out if there are any "local" coding conventions, and work closely with colleagues.
As far as improving "how code runs", if you mean performance optimization, don't do any of that until you're sure you need to. Write the simpler code first, even if it's slower. It's likely that it won't be slow enough to matter.
Special case: if you're writing a game, long-term maintainability is less important, because they tend to be "throwaway" at some level. YMMV.
The recent article of steve jobs link
made me think about the future of flash. I'm learning actionscript 3.0 in my studies but is it the right decision still to go for it? I was pretty sure that I will be able to build application in as3 for iphones/ipads in the near future. It seems to me, while I would stay with flash, the market will be polarized by apple and adobe and you will always work double for both clientele, or just lose half of them.
Which decision would you take as a designer, if you were still at university and you intend to become a freelancer?
This question has been around a lot of times. For my opinion on flash's future please look at this answer: Should I Abandon Adobe Flash for HTML5 and <canvas>?
If you are a designer, you will probably actually feel good working with Adobe's Creative Suite, including Flash CS3/CS4/CS5. CS5 will be able to export HTML5 in the near future: http://www.9to5mac.com/Flash-html5-canvas-35409730 . You shouldn't be too worried. OTOH you should consider, that whatever CS5 exports is likely to perform poorer in HTML5, than on flash player.
From my perspective as a developer, I think there is no harm in learning any language, altough ActionScript 3 is relatively boring and easy to grasp. However this makes it a good language to learn programming, including many best practices. The most important things you learn as a programmer transcend languages. The more languages you try to really fully understand and exploit, the better you become by understanding the approaches they promote.
My personal advice to web developers is to have a look at Haxe. It is a much more powerful, elegant and expressive language than ActionScript and it allows you to target many platforms. Enough to build a whole web app on 'classic' platforms with only one language. Haxe's C++ backend allows building native iPhone apps using an SDL based port of the flash player API, although currently it's not very clear whether Apple's policy will allow distribution. Nonetheless it is an open source language with an enthusiastic community, that moves really fast and adapts to changes rapidly (e.g. unlike ActionScript Haxe can leverage flash player 10's alchemy opcodes for fast memory access) making you as a developer independant.
edit: I have personally dropped any plans of targetting the platform until Apple is willing to ease its very restictive policies, since I find this kind of behaviour intollerable. Nonetheless, I think Objective-C is a great and inspiring language, so you may actually wanna have a look at it.
I think that reports of the death of flash have been greatly exaggerated. Flash has always been "the bad guy" - self-proclaimed experts have always loudly declared that Flash sucks and is on its way out, but oddly enough I've never had any trouble finding lots of Flash work. There are things that you can do quickly and easily in Flash that are either much harder or flat-out impossible without it. It's an amazing tool and it's going to be in use at least in some capacity for the foreseeable future.
That said, even if Flash on the web goes the way of the dodo in two years (which won't happen) it's still a valuable tool. It's a wonderful way to learn Object Oriented Programming, and its uses go far beyond shiny websites. You can use something like Flash Builder in Eclipse to get accustomed to working in a code-oriented IDE, you can build AIR apps to deploy across platforms, you will soon be able to publish saleable apps to every major phone including the iPhone, etc. I've been having a lot of fun with it lately getting it to work with Arduino - it's just a hobby project but I'm trying to build a little helicopter that I can control from an AIR app. I'd be curious to see someone do that in HTML5. ;)
Flash is amazingly powerful - your abilities are in many respects limited only by your imagination and willingness to figure out how to make it work. It's really bizarre to read all of this stuff about how (some) browsers can now play (certain types of) video one their own, ergo Flash is Dead. How unimaginative. :)
This is a tough call. Flash is a fairly dominant technology at this point when it comes to media-intensive web sites. Flash is also very popular for delivering mini-games. I do think that Flash video, which is currently also dominant, will gradually be replaced by HTML5 technologies. I'm not so sure that Flash can be replaced easily when it comes to those media-intensive sites. There is a large number of very talented people comfortable with Flash that might be reluctant to adopt other technologies. I would probably hedge my bets and get comfortable with Javascript and other HTML5 technologies.
Apple vs. Adobe controversy reveals two opposite views of mobile computing.
Apple wants that its developers make the best of its devices by excluding middleware. The aim is to deliver the best possible user experience.
Adobe wants that its developers publish their work on as many platforms as possible. The aim is to reach the widest audience.
Nobody knows which view will win in the future. The mobile war is just beginning...
I think it depends on how far into the future you want to look, and what you think is most important. Flash on the desktop will not die for a long time, if ever. If that is good enough, keep going with where you're going. If not using flash on iPhone/iPad is a deal breaker, you only really have two choices - Objective-C or HTML5.
HTML5 is definitely gaining momentum, but it can't be used directly in all browsers yet, and likely for a while. However, in the mobile space, there is pretty excellent support in the major smart phones.
There isn't a single platform/technology/language that can hit everything. If I were going to bet money on the future, though, I would say HTML5 is going to win for the most reach across platforms. And given it is on the rise, I would bet that in the next few years, there will be a lot of demand for good developers in this area, but don't expect the path to be fully paved for you. You'll have to get your hands a little dirty. If you're looking for a decent editor, I use Netbeans, but I also do Java development, so that makes sense for me. Search around, though, and you'll probably find a decent set of tools that work well for you. It is a very active space.
As far as I'm concerned, Actionscript is a pretty good language to learn OOP. Javascript is a bit shit. Eitherway, I would expect you'd learn a certain set of (frontend/2d graphics) skills which will come in handy regardless of the vehicle you'll eventually use to deploy your work.
Personally, I like the flexscript language used by Flash, it's more structured and object oriented than Javascript. Also it has real inheritance, not the prototype based crap, and compiles to bytecode. For the artist, Flash is easier to use in many ways due to the available tools.
I do hope for better integration into browsers. The current flash plugin is clunky and causes crashes for many users, also the plugin system makes it integrate badly into the flow of pages.
With HTML5, I think the browser plugin idiom is dying in general. Everything from video playback to fancy vector animations can be done with just HTML + Javascript. Even a standard for 3D graphics in webpages is on the way (O3D).
Also I wonder how Adobe will cope with the current explosion of platforms/operating sytems/browsers, especially in the mobile realm. At the moment, the Flash support for systems except for Windows on PC isn't much good.
Just as projects like SVGWeb brings SVG capabilities to browsers that don't have native SVG, I would expect that if/when HTML5 gains traction against Flash there will be conversion capabilities from existing Flash to browsers without Flash. In fact, Adobe already has a conversion from Flash to iPhone using Flash Professional CS5. IMHO, there's too much Flash content in the wild for this not to happen eventually, and there are too many people for which Actionscript is their primary (or only) language for some conversion not to happen.
Career-wise, the clear long-term trend is away from Flash, and I agree with Tom that hedging your bets is wise. However, HTML5 is still fairly new, and you might do yourself a disservice to ignore Flash at this point. With conversion technologies, a Flash skillset will likely be usable for at least several years.
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Has anybody any successful remarks about having a team working via Remote Desktop?
In many workplaces, we put end users via Citrix and the applications on a central, powerful server. Sometimes the clients are in the same building as the server, but often, they are remote.
There could be some huge benefits for me to put my developers on Windows XP or Vista instances running on a couple servers with Hyper-V.
I'm worried that RDP/RDC via the internet would be too slow for somebody to be able to develop efficiently.
I'm sure I can hear plenty of bad things about it... are there any people out there that have had success?
I have seen a situation where the attempt was made to do this with a sattelite office. It was done for a java development team using various java IDE tools. The result wasn't regarded as a success, and the company brought the team back into a central London office at considerable expense.
For someone doing this on a day-in day-out basis on interactive software, the result isn't really very pleasant. For something that mainly uses text-based tools such as vim and unix command line tools, it works somewhat better. At one point I had XVNC going over a 128 Kbit DSL link (of a type that was prevalent in New Zealand at the time) and could do work on an Oracle-based data warehouse at a remote location quite readily. The level of interactivity required by the tooling made them much less sensitive to the slow link than a Windows-based IDE.
So, I'll invoke the 'it depends' argument with some qualifications:
I would not recommend it for a modern IDE, and certainly not for something heavily graphical like Dreamweaver, BI Development Studio or Informatica.
For a textual environment like traditional unix development tools it could probably be made to work quite well. These user interfaces are much less sensitive to latency than a direct-manipulation user interface.
I'm something of a believer in the 'best tools' principle. Going out of your way to give a second-rate user interface to a development team will give off negative signals. The cost saving from doing this is likely to be minimal and it will annoy some of your team members. Even if it can be made to work reasonably well you are still making a value statement by doing this. Weigh the cost saving against the cost of replacing one or more of your key development staff.
We connect to our development environments using RDP and locally the performance is great. It slows a bit over VPN, but is still acceptably responsive.
Turn off all the windows animation functionality, desktop background, etc. and that will help considerably.
If you're not worried about the latency on audio and fast-moving imagery and you're not developing anything dependent on 3D hardware, you'll likely be fine.
I've never used it in a team environment, but I use my laptop RDP'd into my workstation all day and love it.
I've worked in an environment where we would occasionally edit some existing code via remote desktop. There were no significant challenges to this. As a developer I positively hated doing that work. Everything felt slow and unresponsive. However, we got the work done.
Thankfully these were often short 3-4 hours jobs... mostly fixes to existing systems on remote customer sites. I don't think I could recommend it as a normal way of doing work, but its certainly possible.
I've used both VNC and RDP over a DSL connection, running through an SSH tunnel, and have had no real issues.
There are definitely some lags, particularly if you're redrawing large parts of a screen. But most development involves small edits, and both of these protocols handle that very well.
I use Remote Desktop to control my Windows machine at work. I use a Parallels VM on a Mac and my connection is 2.5M down, 256k up.
This works really really well. I've been doing this for 2 years for 1-3 days a week. The slow upspeed isn't an issue - I can't type that fast.
I have 3 screens at work but still find a 20" Mac screen to be superior. The colours are much cleaner and I can work longer at the Mac than my work screens!
The thing that is a killer is Flash on a browser. If I accidentally open a browser on my remote machine with Flash it kills the connection. The solution is to use FlashBlock (a firefox addin).
I use Eclipse and Visual Studio with no issues whatsoever.
I've used it to work from home (remote login to my in-office PC via VPN).
The performance depends on your ISPs, of course.
It's slightly less reliable (because as well as your having downtime when/if ever the office LAN is down, there's now additional risk of downtime while either of the internet connections is down).
I have a remote server on a 1Mbps upstream pipe which I RDP to (over a VPN) and it works just fine. I even use large screen resolutions (1600x1200) with no performance problems. Of course, I'm not sure how such a setup would fare for multiple concurrent users, however.
A benefit of developing over RDP that I hadn't anticipated is that you can save your sessions--so after you get done developing for the day, you quit your RDP client and power down your computer, and when you log back in the following day your session is right where you left it.
As an added bonus, RDP clients are available for linux, and OS X.
I use RDP daily for development, I leave my laptop on at home with my work environment open and ready to go. When I get to work and everybody is loading up their projects and opening their programs I just RDP in and I'm ready to go. You have to keep in mind certain keyboard shortcuts that change though (CTRL+ALT+DEL for example), it is annoying at first but you get used to it.
To keep the latency to a minimum, I recommend...
turning the colors down to 256 (after all, you only need to see text)
Leave the wallpaper at the other computer
Leave sounds at the other computer
Leave any themes on the other computer
Choose a lower connection speed, even if yours is higher. Windows will minimize the data sent.
One of the advantages you might also consider is processing power. If your machine at home has far better specifications than your workstation on the job, compilation time is improved a fair bit. Since your local machine only needs to update the image from the remote machine, your local computer is not under load.
Using this option also allows me to keep on track. While others log in and browse the internet and waste time, I'm set up and ready to go. Being more productive helps you get paid the big bucks (if your employer notices), while others are still stuck in their junior programming roles.
Pre-2000 I did it for 3 years every day several hours a day. This was when bandwidth sucked too.
Nowadays it's much much better.
And if you use NxMachine life gets even better :)
I did not, however, use the machine with multiple users. My concern with that would be that developers are a finicky bunch (myself included) and we tend to push machines really hard as it is.
Can't imagine several folks on one box all deciding to compile :)
G-Man
We do it with citrix and is very fast.
I wonder what the reason for this would be. Does the central server(s) have access to some resources that the individual developer machines could not access?
I'm using RDP to connect from my home computer to my work computer from time to time. I have to say - it's possible to code, but it's way more comfortable to do it when the IDE is on your own machine. Even when on a 100MBit LAN there is some noticeable lag. Not enough to bother work, but annoying nevertheless.
If the people have to work from remote places on a regular basis, I'd rather prefer a setup where the central source control is available through some secure protocol (HTTPS, VPN, etc.), but the development can happen locally on the developer's machines. If using something like SVN, which works well even with offline development, then it should be way more comfortable for the programmers themselves.
What is important for a development workstation is sheer processing power. At our place the developers have the most high-end workstations in terms of cpu, memory, disk, etc and not in terms of audio and graphics. It's the latter that are most affected by RDP.
As long as the server that your developers are RDP-ing to is fast enough to handle multiple compiles, builds at the same time you should be fine.
As with all things, the answer to your question is "Your Milage May Vary" or YMMV. It depends on what the developers are doing. Do they spend most of their time writing code, or do they do a lot of large compiles? Do they need direct hardware access?
Do they need debugging rights? Once you grant them debugging rights, they basically own the machine and can interfere with other users.
It's typically much better to allow the users to develop on their own computers, and use a VPN to allow them to acces the version control system. Then they can checkout the files to their local computers and do whatever they want, then checkin the changes.
But, RDP has it's advantages too. You really need to weigh the pro's and cons and decide which list is longer or more "weighty".
I use NoMachine NX Client to remote desktop onto a headless server that runs FreeNX. It is great because I can login to my session from anywhere and my last session is still there for me. Speed has never been a problem, except when the DSL line is down.
Anyway, my point is that if you are running a Linux server and use 'vi' then there is a nicer alternative than 'screen'.