Blogs

I’ve moved my blog over to http://ambiguiti.es from now on. Over there I’ll be talking about web and mobile development, and maintain a more general blog relating to events, conferences, job postings, and other such news in the industry.

When I saw this I breathed a huge sigh of relief. It looks like an upcoming version of Firefox will have run-time byte-code compilation of script, giving near-native code performance to some JavaScript. What does this mean? basically 5 to 6x improvements in performance for many JavaScript-intensive applications.

Read all about it here.

Someone told me about this post of Christian Cantrell’s (of Macromedia and Adobe fame) listing several incredibly handy AS3 libraries.

These free open source libs are as follows:

• as3corelib: various utilities like advanced date parsing.
• as3exchangelib: talks to Exchange servers.
• as3nativealertlib: a modal alert that appears in its own native window.
• as3notificationlib: creates notification windows, and provides a layer of abstraction on top of OS-specific notifications.
• as3preferenceslib: manages application preference persistence, including encryption when necessary.

So I was looking into in-browser compression for my RobotReplay work..

This is actually a really hard thing to Google because of the confusion with gZipping JavaScript resources for lower file sizes on the web. That particular problem is easy to solve and commonplace. What’s really unique and interesting to me are the applications of gZipping content in JavaScript for offline storage or delayed transmission, or for compressing Ajax requests over an uncompressed connection. It could also be a little useful for the purposes of encoding your data from prying eyes.

Why we might want to perform gZip compression in a JavaScript program:

• Reduce data footprint before storing in offline storage (IE UserData, Flash SharedObject storage, sessionStorage, globalStorage, Google Gears, etc etc) since all of these have limits to how much you can store.
• Reducing bandwidth requirements for transmitting large amounts of data via an Ajax or cross-domain XHR request.

I can’t think of any others right now but I found this showing a working proof of concept of LZ77 (gZip) compression in JavaScript. There are some ‘catches’, however.

This was only really useful if you are compressing large-ish amounts of data (10K+) or the benefits derived from compression don’t outweigh the costs, which are: larger footprint for your JavaScript program, the inherent hassle of dealing with compressed data, and also performance.

Also, this proof of concept really illustrates how SLOW JavaScript is in general. Even compressing small amounts of data can take several seconds. So I wanted to find a better way to do this. So I worked on finding another (better) way to compress the data.

Then I had an idea.. what about using Flash to do the same thing and then use ExternalInterface to marshal between your JavaScript program and the Flash movie? It was worth an experiment.

So here is a demo showing compression of text data using the same algorithm in JavaScript and AS2 (Flash 9) via external Interface.

Note: in the chart below, smaller is better.

Again the demo is here: http://blogs.nitobi.com/alexei/demos/compression/index.htm

Download the source here: http://blogs.nitobi.com/alexei/demos/compression/nitobi_js_compression.zip

I read an interesting tidbit today about the whole “click to activate” issue that has plagued the Adobe Flash community for the last year or so.

First some background.. a while back, a very litigious and selfish patent holder EOLAS sued Microsoft because embedding a flash movie or other component in a webpage appeared to be a violation of their undeveloped patent. The result was the Microsoft had to add a mouse-click requirement in order to activate Flash movies (and other media objects) on a page.. at least ones that weren’t generated by script.
Now that we’re up to speed, the news is that Microsoft has licensed said technique from the patent holder, EOLAS and will soon be releasing a patch to fix IE. Yay! This greatly simplifies the use of Flash in webpages again.