Disqus - Latest Comments for jcon

Re: newfoo: Performance Tuning Android Applications

Jim Connell — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:34:53 -0000

Hi There,

The content ended up being so specific I couldn't make a suitable post about it. Fortunately, someone asked me about this once -- here are more of the details:

In getView() we originally followed the efficient list view example (it looks as if it's moved here: http://developer.android.co....

The problem for us was that we were updating a lot of text every time getView() was being called. The way we worked around it was this way:

1.) I observed that we had a small number of items in the entire list: (never more than 24)
2.) the convertView argument (second argument of getView) was often forcing us to redraw a lot of text. Even though we reduced the calls to inflator#inflate(), we still losing efficiency.

If you have a small number of rows (say less than 30), with complicated drawing operations, a similar approach might suit you.

To fix our problem, I introduced a second cache that cached the final bitmap displayed by the listView depending on what the row we were using (see below method called cacheFetch). If cacheFetch failed, we fell back to the original logic used in efficient list views. The "key" value used was the underlying data that was used for the row being drawn.

Unfortunately, formatting seems pretty bad on disqus commnts, so here's a short GIST outlining what the code looked like: https://gist.github.com/117...

Re: newfoo

Jim Connell — Fri, 08 May 2009 10:57:30 -0000

Hi Warjan,

Thanks for letting me know. What OS & JVM do you have installed? I'd like
to see if I can figure it out on a similar setup here. I'm about to upload
a more substantial JavaFX app and I want to make sure it works on everyone's
computer :)

Thank you,

Jim

Re: newfoo: Google App Engine Will Change Java Web Development

Jim Connell — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 23:56:41 -0000

That's a good question Kaan. There's an excellent JavaScript library called SyntaxHighlighter from Alex Gorbatchev that does all the hard work for me (http://alexgorbatchev.com/w.... I was able to get it up and running very quickly using his excellent documentation here: http://alexgorbatchev.com/w....

Re: newfoo: Google App Engine Will Change Java Web Development

Jim Connell — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 10:47:48 -0000

Hi Mike, it's something I've been working on in my spare time. I was inspired by Jekyll (http://github.com/mojombo/j..., a Ruby-based static CMS. Jekyll is really great, but I wanted to add some features. I was discouraged by the Liquid template language, so I decided to cook up a static CMS tool using Python and Django's template system. It's coming together nicely, so I'm going to open-source it after I get back from vacation in two weeks if you're interested.

Re: newfoo: Google App Engine Will Change Java Web Development

Jim Connell — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:46:00 -0000

Thanks for the pointer. I haven't ever heard of Click. It's project goals sound pretty appealing. What sort of sites have you been using it on?

Re: newfoo: Google App Engine Will Change Java Web Development

Jim Connell — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:43:38 -0000

It's true competent Java developers can write apps quickly, once they've got a good framework in place. There's nothing inherent to Java that makes it less productive than say something like Ruby on Rails or Django. What I feel Java is lacking is a killer framework like those two. If you consider the productivity gains you see in teams using Django though, there aren't any comparably popular Java web stacks. It's true that we've had some emerging over the past few years -- Stripes, as you mentioned and Grails really seem to have some potential. I believe app engine will only grow the user communities of these and other frameworks like them. In the end it'll help increase Java as the choice for more startup sites.

I hadn't seen the restriction to only java.util.Logging. Util Logging is on the white-list, but the GAE Eclipse plugin generates a log4j.properties in it's new project wizard. From what I can tell the output in the local environment seems to work with Log4j.

By the way, I've been off my unfortunate struts habit for 6 years and I'll never go back!

Re: newfoo: Google App Engine Will Change Java Web Development

Jim Connell — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:23:56 -0000

I agree totally Java makes great sense for sites like e-Bay because of all the reasons you mentioned. I believe that app engine will begin make it a better choice for little blogging apps. As it gets more adoption in projects like this, we'll see more innovation in simpler web stacks. We should also see more adoption of the frameworks like Grails. In the end, it should mean that Java will not only be a good choice for the ridiculously massive sites like e-Bay, but emerging start-up sites too.

Re: newfoo

Jim Connell — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:25:29 -0000

Hi Matt -- Thanks! The image has a link to the real animation if you're interested.