• standard mac book pro 2Gb of Rams.
• Database is Sql Server 2005 that runs in a virtual machine on the same machine.
• 3,5 millions of rows. The dataset has dimensions with a pretty low cardinality.
• We skipped data retrieve time. We use standard JDBC here. However, we have a small performance impact above JDBC as we need to marshal data between Flex and Java.

For Flex developers interested in what’s happening under the wood, we used heavily vectors to build the OLAP engine. It would be impossible to achieve this level of performance with standard Array. We used green thread to optimize the rendering. Merapi is used for the bridge between Java and Air…

French Online Video Audience Grows 16 Percent in the Past Year to 27 Million Viewers in January! See above.

Full screen is here

So, how to use RSL winthin an ant script to reduce the size of the swf result file ?

Firs of all, you have to use a configuration file witch specifies a lots of information to the compiler about your application like the name, the player version, etc. So, you can create your own configuration file and specify all the informations needed. A sample of the file is in the flex sdk named “flex-config.xml”. Inside this file, you can write a tag runtime-shared-library-path witch specify the SWC file you want to use as an RSL.

After the build, the SWF file of the project is smaller than before and you have just to put the framework.swz and framework.swf file at the correct location on the server to use them as Runtime Shared Libraries !

<chartsExtention:ColoredAndSizedColumnChart id="chart" width="100%" height="100%">
  <chartsExtention:annotationElements>
	<DataCanvas:TrendCartesianDataCanvas id="trendCanvas" includeInRanges="true"/>
   </chartsExtention:annotationElements>
...

Now you can call method like drawLinearTrend() or drawPolynomialTrend(). It’s that easy and should work with all cartesian charts (column / bar / plot etc…) without extra work.

Have a look here for a demo. View source enabled.

Let us know for any trouble. Huge credits to the as3mathlib for the maths.

We don’t stop to add features like this in Bime so if you are interested in, register above to the Beta. It should come very soon: jump on the bandwagon!

Design goals were to:

1) add more encoding variables to the standard charts: size, color and shape are used to convey more meaning to visualizations.

2) charts should be as easy to use as the flex ones and require no extra work.

Click on the image below to see some sample (but be warned that it is just technical examples: axis are not properly formated, titles are missing etc…)

We used extensively degrafa. Almost all data renderers are rewritten using it. Thanks to the degrafa team for the good work. We only scratched the surface and it opens already a lot of opportunities for innovations in the data visualization field. We also used examples written by Ely Greenfield. Once again, I can’t imagine doing this kind of work without Flex being open source.

Bime will help end users to create easily this type of visualization (+ treemap, sparkline etc…) on the fly. With a simple drag and drop user interface, they’ll be able to visually analyze their data from almost anywhere: web services, cloud databases, relational databases, spreadsheets…

If we see some interest, we plan to open source these extensions soon after the official launch of bime in March. So, if you are interested drop us a line in a comment below!

Why?

Try to validate your default flex 3 html wrapper against this validator. You should get a bunch of errors. For the full rational look at here and at Ted Patrick.

How?

Gumbo, Flex 4, will include templates based on SWFObject. Steal them and use them today!

1) Download Gumbo SDK here. Choose the latest milestone release and the Open Source Flex SDK (the small one).

2) Look for a “templates” folder in the unziped directory. Copy it. 10 seconds…

3) Go to your SDK home. On Mac os: Applications > Adobe Flex Builder 3 (plug-in) > sdks > 3.x.x . Rename the “templates” directory as “templates bak”. Paste the new one. 20 seconds…

4) Open Flex Builder / Eclipse. Force the refresh by making a change on the project settings of the html wrapper. Build. 30 seconds: you are done.

By the way, validate your new page against the validator. Woow, no error. Thanks Gumbo.

Disclaimer: I didn’t test extensively with history enabled. But we use that for our main app and some projects for several weeks and so far it works great. Let me know if you face any trouble.

* flash player 10’s vectors (only indexing for now)

* instantiation of Array, Object, Vector and (very expensive) ArrayCollection

* different type of loop

and more!

It’s important to remember to always take this benchmark with a grain of salt. That said, if you feel the benchmarks being tested are lame, feel free to contribute to code on github. Also, I used a lot of blog posts written by others to do this. Even if there are some comments in the source code, it lacks some proper credits. Sorry about that guys but justice will be done in the next update.

the application

the source

the lighthouse project

To help us, we build an application, open source (MIT), the “AS3 performance tester”, that takes some operations (such as incrementing a variable) and measure the time consumed by the different options you can use to achieve the operation.

There are a lot of resources on the web about AS3 performance but none seem to embrace the whole problem. Enter the AS3 performance tester. With it, we are trying to build a comprehensive tool that demonstrates (with tests) which syntax for a particular task is the most performant in AS3.

But first things first with the usuals:

More Computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency than any other reason including blind stupidity”–W.A. Wulf

“Premature Optimization is the root of all evil.”-Hoare and Knuth

“Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don’t try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you have proven that’s where the bottleneck is.”- Rob Pike

Nevertheless, here we talk of the basic of the AS3 language. Things you do in your everyday programming. Do you know the faster way to loop over an array ? Do you know that division is slower than multiplication and slower than bitwise operations ?

Most of the time, to provide accurate metrics, we loop on the operation a number of times and we calculate the mean. This application will evolve to include more robust tests.

We also used the D.eval library to allow the user to enter 2 scripts and compare performance on the fly. It uses a kind of eval() function so the code is much slower than actual compiled code. Nevertheless, our tests, so far, show that the proportions are right: a script slower with the eval() will be slower when compiled. Nevertheless, we mark this feature as highly experimental as my understanding of what the D.eval do can give improper results.

the application

the source

the lighthouse project

Solution 1: the wrong way

You take care of hosting the videos file on a server behind the same domain you served your RIA application. This is important because you can’t stream videos (or anything for that it matters) from another domain unless it has a liberal crossdomain.xml file in the root or unless you proxy request (a pain). Forget YouTube, Vimeo and any major video delivering solution.

Problems: all rely in the solution= “you need to take care of the files”. Here come a bunch of problems: files are most of the time pretty big. You will need to back them up, you can’t check them in your source control or they slow down your deploy to a new server and explode your repository size, you can, of course, host them on a separate server but, hey, it’s a new server to manage etc…

Solution 2: the easy way

You can simply put your videos (and all your static files by the way) on Amazon S3. I hear your inner geek: “but Amazon S3 don’t have a a liberal crossdomain.xml file!”. Yes but they have virtual hosting of bucket. It means you can have a cname that points to S3 in your domain.

For example: videos.wearecloud.com can point  to a S3 bucket available at videos.wearecloud.com.s3.amazonaws.com. For the Flashplayer it is exactly the same domain that served the RIA application, hence no security error. For you, it is a whole new world of easy video streaming in your RIA with nothing to worry about.

The steps

1) Create a bucket that matches the hostname you want. Let’s say “videos.wearecloud.com”

2) Create a CNAME on your domain like that:

videos.wearecloud.com CNAME videos.wearecloud.com.s3.amazonaws.com

nota: the exact process depends of your DNS hosting but it should be pretty easy and, in general, involves a DNS zone file.

That’s it. In your Flex app you can:

<mx:VideoDisplay autoPlay="true"  source="http://videos.wearecloud.com/yourvideo.flv" />

Going further

On the performance side, we are so far pretty happy with this solution. But let’s face it: it is not yet as fast as with a FMS in the basement. Nevertheless, amazon annouced a few weeks ago CloudFront, that is basically a Content Delivery Network (CDN) on top of S3. An simple API call make your bucket redundant across the globe for faster delivery.

We didn’t test this yet, but it should be an effective way to speed up the solution. Let us know if you test this out or if you have any trouble with the steps above.