EWD/ExtJS Desktop
Rob Tweed
laboratory at Devcon this week!
Many of those who attended Devcon saw our EWD/ExtJS Desktop: a set of
extensions to EWD that makes use of the ExtJS Javascript widget
framework (www.extjs.com). At AjaxWorld in NYC, the "web desktop" was
something many companies were talking about, but we believe we've got
something unique: an implementation that really works for real and
allows you to use this new "browser as OS" concept for real, live,
database-connected applications, and, even more unusually, makes the
task almost trivially simple. For once, we've leveraged Cache to be
in the pioneering forefront of the Web/Ajax world, instead of
following others in a reactive role.
Anyway, judge for yourselves. Take a look at our live running demo at
http://ec2.mgateway.com which demonstrates the web desktop concept.
This has been built using Cache + EWD + our new ExtJS integration
extensions. No smoke and mirrors: this is the real deal, a live
Cache-based set of applications. Try running it in IE and put it into
full-screen mode. You'll understand why MS is running very scared of
this kind of thing: the virtual OS experience delivered to a client
machine that would, in theory, need nothing but a browser, with, in
this case, Cache driving and controlling that experience. Someone at
Devcon remarked to me: "I did actually spot a difference between what
you've done and MS Vista - your stuff didn't crash!"
You'll also see integration of the stunning Emprise Javascript Charts
widget library (www.ejschart.com) that allows you to generate graphs
and charts that require no plug-ins, no SVG at all: they're pure
Javascript! And they are unbelievably fast. As our demos and source
code examples will demonstrate, EWD also makes them trivially simple
to use, allowing you to have graphs and charts running in your
Cache-based web applications literally in a matter of minutes.
Notice, too, that you'll be able to run this demo in pretty much any
browser: the ExtJS and EJS Charts look after all the cross-browser
compatibility issues.
Finally, for those of you who attended our SlipstreamUSA conference,
note that ec2.mgateway.com is, as the domain name suggests, an example
of an Amazon EC2 virtual machine, in this case one that I've installed
all our software on and pre-configured, running on a pay-as-we-go
basis with no up-front costs (see http://aws.amazon.com/ec2)
Over the next week or so I'll be making this new version available on
our web site at www.mgateway.com, and start putting together
documentation for it. First I need to catch up on jet-lag and far too
many early mornings and late nights at Devcon!
---
Rob Tweed
M/Gateway Developments Ltd
SlipstreamUSA: April 2, Renaissance Hotel, Orlando
http://www.OutOfTheSlipstream.com
---
Sukesh Hoogan
Rob Tweed wrote:
> Well we finally revealed the fruits of our labours in our secret
> laboratory at Devcon this week!
>
> Anyway, judge for yourselves. Take a look at our live running demo at
> http://ec2.mgateway.com which demonstrates the web desktop concept.
> This has been built using Cache + EWD + our new ExtJS integration
> extensions. No smoke and mirrors: this is the real deal, a live
> Cache-based set of applications. Try running it in IE and put it into
> full-screen mode. You'll understand why MS is running very scared of
> this kind of thing: the virtual OS experience delivered to a client
> machine that would, in theory, need nothing but a browser, with, in
> this case, Cache driving and controlling that experience. Someone at
> Devcon remarked to me: "I did actually spot a difference between what
> you've done and MS Vista - your stuff didn't crash!"
Great job.
In FireFiox, during page loading, the script takes very long. I get
error message - unresponsive script and I am prompted several times
whether to stop the script or continue.
In IE, I get an error message Stack overflow at line 14. When the page
fully loads, there is no Start bar at the bottom of the window.
I am on a broadband connection.
Is this meant for intranet applications?
Regards
Sukesh Hoogan
Bombay, India
[Enterprise Resource Planning & Business Intelligence]
Mark Sires
It works fine for me with both IE 7 and Firefox. The graphics render a
little better in Firefox than IE, but the speed in both is very good, and
comparable to the response time of my desktop apps (faster to load than most
of them actually).
So, it works fine from Illinois, USA. Perhaps your connection is still
feeling the affects of the cable cuts that have not been repaired......
Mark
"Sukesh Hoogan" <"sukesh_hoogan <at> wrote in message
news:47f64...@info2.kinich.com...
Sukesh Hoogan
No, the cable cuts did not affect my service provider. They were the
first (at one time had a monopoly) and the largest internet service
company in India. They have multiple internet gateways and they do not
use the cable that got cut, so it did not affect the users.
Regards
Sukesh Hoogan
Bombay, India
[Enterprise Resource Planning & Business Intelligence]
Rob Tweed
I've never seen any such problems, when running anywhere in the UK or
in the USA. What does Firebug report in its Net section? That may
give you a clue as to what's going on. Sounds like something either
at your client end, browsers or your network
Try going to the ExtJS site and running some of their examples and see
how you get on with them.
Regards
Rob
On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:19:30 +0530, Sukesh Hoogan <"sukesh_hoogan <at>
wrote:
Sukesh Hoogan
A) Ran many samples on extjs. No problems whatsoever in FireFox.
The pages do not render completely in IE 6.0.2800
For example, LHS menu for download and samples on the home page is not
displayed, so cannot run any samples.
B) For http://ec2.mgateway.com
The Error console in FireFox only shows warning messages about certain
attributes/properties (like filter, khtml, zoom) and the declarations
are dropped.
C) In spite of the loading problems of the main page and warning
messages, everything on your web site runs fine in FireFox.
In IE, still the same problem, no start bar at the bottom and the links
do not work. IE did download some dlls (inetcplc.dll and inetcplc.cpl),
no luck.
D) I will download FireBug tomorrow and see.
Regards
Sukesh
Bombay, India
[Enterprise Resource Planning & Business Intelligence]
Rob Tweed
on XP. I'll contact ExtJS with any consistently reported problems
Rob
On Sat, 05 Apr 2008 01:23:32 +0530, Sukesh Hoogan <"sukesh_hoogan <at>
StayPuft
From Georgia in the US, it is surprisingly snappy. You may be seeing
the effects of some higher layer "help". Also a look at rtt and the
number of hops may be illuminating. I don't know if Amazon uses Akamai
or something similar. I know people do interesting things with DNS.
For a while the ISP 1 & 1 was unavailable to me because DNS resolved
their geographic location to Europe (Germany, as I recall) although the
web page I wanted was in a datacenter in Manhattan in New York.
Regards,
Scott
Sukesh Hoogan
If it helps, the OS is Win2KP.
Regards
Sukesh Hoogan
Bombay, India
[Enterprise Resource Planning & Business Intelligence]
kevin furze
John Bertoglio
The critical issue here is that this issue is of serious business interest
ot the Ext-JS folks. The advantage of using a commercial JS framework is
that it is their business to make it work. I have seen none of these
problems but the libraries are large and do take some time for the initial
downloads. Once they are cached, the response should be quite fast. I find
that while AJAX apps can be hard on the server (due to more numerous hits),
the use experiences faster response because the payloads are smaller.
jb
"Sukesh Hoogan" <"sukesh_hoogan <at> wrote in message
news:47f64...@info2.kinich.com...
Sukesh Hoogan
That is what is happening with FireFox - time to load the libraries,
once done, it is a dream.
There is a still a problem with IE, have tried to run with various
security settings, no luck.
Just tried again, before posting this.
http://www.extjs.com and http://ec2.mgateway.com
Doesn't work. Same error message. I will try it later from another
computer on a different connection later in the day and report.
Regards
Sukesh Hoogan
Bombay, India
[Enterprise Resource Planning & Business Intelligence]
Sukesh Hoogan
http://www.extjs.com = loaded normally.
http://ec2.mgateway.com - did not load for about 7 minutes and did not
seem it would.
Regards
Sukesh
Bombay, India
[Enterprise Resource Planning & Business Intelligence]
Rob Tweed
I've run XP + IE6 and IE7 on various PCs from various locations in the
UK and the US over the past few weeks and have not seen any problems
such as those you're describing.
Unless anyone else out there can confirm that they're also seeing a
problem, on the basis of other feedback here, it would seem that
everyone else appears to have no problem running XP and IE either.
This suggests there must be something different somewhere along the
path between ec2.mgateway.com and your browser. Without knowing what,
if any, Javascript errors you're seeing, it's impossible to tell what
or where the problem might be.
Does anyone else see any similar problems?
Can I suggest you get something like debugBar (free for IE) or use the
Microsoft script debugger (part of MS Office) to pinpoint the
problem(s)? Without some meaningful errors, there's no way to
diagnose why you're seeing problems nobody else sees, because it's all
as clean as a whistle for me!
My suggestions for possible reasons for your problems would be:
- something timing out (browser? proxy? IE's networking? DNS?)
- a proxy server causing some sort of problem
Did Firefox work on that connection? And have you tried Safari for
Windows?
Regards
Rob
On Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:09:33 +0530, Sukesh Hoogan <"sukesh_hoogan <at>
Sukesh Hoogan
I will check, give a day or two. I will revert with clearer picture.
Regards
Sukesh
Bombay, India
[Enterprise Resource Planning & Business Intelligence]
John Bertoglio
cloud and Sukesh's broadband connection. Try a trace route/ping and see if
the values are ugly.
jb
"Sukesh Hoogan" <"sukesh_hoogan <at> wrote in message
news:47f7d...@info2.kinich.com...
Sean Connelly
Hi Rob,
Good to see your using EXT-JS.
Regards,
Sean Connelly
Rob Tweed
Ext.onReady is actually used within the library App.js, where the
actual desktop initialisation and startup occurs. All the logic you
see in the View/Source is simply calls to constructors which don't
otherwise do anything else at the time, so they can (and I believe
should) be done inline during the rendering of the main "container"
page.
The pattern you're seeing in the EWD/ExtJS desktop is in line with the
way the ExtJS desktop examples are laid out.
Sukesh, try accessing the following desktop demo which Todd Murdock
from the ExtJS community has been developing:
http://qwikioffice.com/desktop-demo/login.html
I know he's made quite a few changes to the standard desktop logic
originally written by Jack Slocum. Let me know if this works better
and I'll check out whether there are any differences he's made that
might affect the timing.
Of course, as you'll have seen from the examples in the source code
window, EWD is generating all the miles and miles of ExtJS code, and
each widget and desktop component is defined using a simple custom
tag, eg
<ext:desktop>
<ext:window>
<ext:grid>
etc...
This makes it all so simple that you can create an initial desktop
using EWD in just a few minutes, and, just as importantly, modify it
very quickly and simply too. Try doing that with hand-crafted ExtJS
code!!
Rob
swe...@gmail.com
On Apr 4, 3:12 pm, Rob Tweed <rtw...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Anyone else get similar problems? No problems here with IE 6.0.2900
> on XP. I'll contact ExtJS with any consistently reported problems
>
> Rob
>
> On Sat, 05 Apr 2008 01:23:32 +0530, Sukesh Hoogan <"sukesh_hoogan <at>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> >Rob
>
> >A) Ran many samples on extjs. No problems whatsoever in FireFox.
>
> >The pages do not render completely in IE 6.0.2800
> >For example, LHS menu for download and samples on the home page is not
> >displayed, so cannot run any samples.
>
> >>>>>> SlipstreamUSA: April 2, Renaissance Hotel, Orlando
> >>>>>>http://www.OutOfTheSlipstream.com
> >>>>>> ---
>
> >> ---
> >> Rob Tweed
> >> M/Gateway Developments Ltd
>
> >>http://www.mgateway.com
>
> >> SlipstreamUSA: April 2, Renaissance Hotel, Orlando
> >>http://www.OutOfTheSlipstream.com
> >> ---
>
> ---
> Rob Tweed
> M/Gateway Developments Ltd
>
> http://www.mgateway.com
>
> SlipstreamUSA: April 2, Renaissance Hotel, Orlandohttp://www.OutOfTheSlipstream.com
> ---
Win XP sp2 Firefox 2.0.0.13 or IE7 - no probs at all, Texas USA
Regards
Luis
Luis Swetlik
> on XP. I'll contact ExtJS with any consistently reported problems
>
> Rob
>
> On Sat, 05 Apr 2008 01:23:32 +0530, Sukesh Hoogan <"sukesh_hoogan <at>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> >Rob
>
> >A) Ran many samples on extjs. No problems whatsoever in FireFox.
>
> >The pages do not render completely in IE 6.0.2800
> >For example, LHS menu for download and samples on the home page is not
> >displayed, so cannot run any samples.
>
Julius Kavay
to see one more connection-test
Rob Tweed wrote:
> Sukesh, try accessing the following desktop demo which Todd Murdock
> from the ExtJS community has been developing:
connect to: http://qwikioffice.com/desktop-demo/login.html
after 10-11 seconds I see the login page, click in login
after 15-16 second I'm on the main page and ready to push the start button
connect to: http://ec2.mgateway.com
after 20-21 seconds I'm on the main page and ready to push the start button
Connection: 2MB
Location : Vienna, Europe
A traceroute says more the thousend words...
Tracing route to qwikioffice.com [216.197.117.212]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms cerberus.kav-edv [192.168.1.1]
2 3 ms 3 ms 2 ms 213.129.245.1
3 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms 86.59.66.1
4 41 ms 8 ms 7 ms Ge2-3-c1.ix.sil.at [86.59.127.69]
5 7 ms 7 ms 6 ms Ge2-4-edge03.vivi.sil.at [86.59.127.18]
6 8 ms 7 ms 7 ms wien-s2-rou-1002.AT.eurorings.net [134.222.123.149]
7 16 ms 16 ms 16 ms mchn-s1-rou-1002.DE.eurorings.net [134.222.228.45]
8 17 ms 14 ms 16 ms mchn-s1-rou-1022.DE.eurorings.net [134.222.112.114]
9 15 ms 19 ms 16 ms mchn-s1-rou-1021.DE.eurorings.net [134.222.229.89]
10 23 ms 23 ms 23 ms ffm-s1-rou-1021.DE.eurorings.net [134.222.229.45]
11 29 ms 28 ms 29 ms asd2-rou-1021.NL.eurorings.net [134.222.229.9]
12 115 ms 114 ms 114 ms nyk-s1-rou-1001.US.eurorings.net [134.222.231.230]
13 114 ms 114 ms 114 ms 134.222.249.254
14 109 ms 109 ms 109 ms jfk-core-02.inet.qwest.net [205.171.30.17]
15 179 ms 178 ms 178 ms phn-core-01.inet.qwest.net [67.14.19.38]
16 180 ms 179 ms 179 ms scd-edge-01.inet.qwest.net [205.171.12.42]
17 180 ms 179 ms 180 ms 63.148.218.166
18 180 ms 179 ms 181 ms 216.119.120.8
19 182 ms 180 ms 180 ms qwikioffice.com [216.197.117.212]
but no chance to ec2.mgateway.com...
Tracing route to ec2.mgateway.com [67.202.57.78]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms cerberus.kav-edv [192.168.1.1]
2 4 ms 2 ms 2 ms 213.129.245.1
3 7 ms 8 ms 6 ms 86.59.66.1
4 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms Ge2-3-c2.ix.sil.at [86.59.127.73]
5 7 ms 6 ms 6 ms Ge2-1-egde02.ix.sil.at [86.59.127.58]
6 8 ms 9 ms 7 ms sil.VIE-5-eth010-108.at.lambdanet.net [80.86.169.157]
7 18 ms 17 ms 17 ms NUE-2-pos730-0.de.lambdanet.net [217.71.105.81]
8 22 ms 20 ms 22 ms FRA-3-eth000.de.lambdanet.net [217.71.96.73]
9 63 ms 32 ms 34 ms ge-4-3-0.fra20.ip.tiscali.net [213.200.65.213]
10 122 ms 120 ms 120 ms so-3-0-0.was11.ip.tiscali.net [213.200.80.126]
11 120 ms 121 ms 121 ms 77.67.108.34
12 111 ms 112 ms 111 ms 72.21.197.16
13 114 ms 112 ms 111 ms othr-216-182-232-61.usma2.compute.amazonaws.com[216.182.232.61]
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * ^C
anyway, the times Sukesh got are, indeed, a 'little too long' ;-((
hth and
have a nice day
julius
--
try a traceroute to Vienna, ftp.kavay.at
Julius Kavay
WinXP Sp2 and Firefox 2.0.0.13
hth and
have a nice day
julius
--
///
Sukesh Hoogan
01) My problem is not with FireFox.
Win2KP - FireFox 2.0.0.13
http://www.extjs.com - 15 seconds to load the home page and then I can fly.
http://ec2.mgateway.com - 45/50 seconds, with three prompts for script
loading. After that it is a dream to access subsections.
45/50 seconds may be on the higher side.
02) It is the damn IE 6.0.X (I do not use it regularly anyway, it was to
test the above web sites). Problems as posted earlier.
I even changed the security settings to prompt me for script/activeX
loading - no such prompting.
I will do the testing as suggested by Rob tomorrow.
Regards
Sukesh
Bombay, India
[Enterprise Resource Planning & Business Intelligence]
Sukesh Hoogan
http://qwikioffice.com/desktop-demo/login.html
A) FireFox
5 seconds on the login page.
20 seconds on demo page (most of the time is consumed by loading of the
wallpaper) and then smooth sailing.
B) IE
Login Page does not load. All one gets is a coloured page of death.
The page source this page.
@@@@@@@@@@
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>A qWikiOffice Desktop Login</title>
<!-- EXT -->
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="../Ext/2.0.1/resources/css/ext-all.css" />
<script type="text/javascript"
src="../Ext/2.0.1/adapter/ext/ext-base.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../Ext/2.0.1/ext-all.js"></script>
<!-- LOGIN -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="system/login/cookies.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="resources/css/desktop.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="system/login/login.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="system/login/login.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id='loginDialogId'></div>
</body>
</html>
@@@@@@@@@@
Regards
Sukesh
Bombay, India
[Enterprise Resource Planning & Business Intelligence]
Rob Tweed
OK this makes sense. What you're almost certainly seeing here is the
way IE6 limits the number of HTTP connections that it will run in
parallel to just 2. I believe that MS will be increasing this limit
to 6 in the near future, but of course this limit will hobble existing
IE browsers for many years to come. There is a configuration setting
for IE that allows you to change this limit by the way, so you may
want to try playing with it to see the difference
(http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=282402) [for some more background
on this issue see
http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2008/03/20/roundup-on-parallel-connections/]
I'm also going to try a few things - I've now combined some of the JS
libraries into one file, for example, so you may see a little
improvement already.
Also this issue has prompted me to implement in EWD a mechanism I've
been meaning to do for some time: "just in time" JS library loading
when calling page fragments. This should allow me to delay loading
the EJS Charts JS libraries until the first time you bring a chart up
- at present I'm loading them as well as all the ExtJS ones, so adding
to the initial load time. Of course this will delay the appearance of
the first image, but hopefully not by too much, and should improve the
initial load time of the main desktop page.
Regards
Rob
On Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:45:41 +0530, Sukesh Hoogan <"sukesh_hoogan <at>
wrote:
>Julius
---
George James
During our flight back to the UK, John Murray and I were chatting about
Chris Munt's SlipstreamUSA presentation about scalable web servers and
infrastructure. One thing we discussed was a technique for dealing with
the browser connection limit that Chris happened to mention.
It's a well known problem with applications like Google maps that have
to serve up a large number tile images very quickly and don't want to be
throttled by the connection limit - in Google's case, in particular,
their servers can handle it ;)
If you have control over both the ajax calls and the server
configuration, you can engineer it so that each ajax request goes to a
different sub-domain, for example a.mgateway.com, b.mgateway.com,
c.mgateway.com, etc. You can make these all resolve to the same
physical server, but as far as the browser is concerned they are all
different. This way you never reach the 2 connection limit.
There's more details about this technique here:
http://www.ajaxperformance.com/?p=33 Note the comments after the
article about using a wildcard DNS and any old random string for the
sub-domain.
Hope this helps
George
Rob Tweed
Yes this potential solution was mentioned in the article I earlier
referred to
(http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2008/03/20/roundup-on-parallel-connections)
In a production Ajax application over the open Internet you might at
times need to adopt this approach, particularly where, as in the case
of the web desktop, you need to serve up a lot of Javascript
initially.
Google Maps is constantly, pre-emptively making asyncronous calls for
tiles around the boundary you're currently viewing. By comparison, as
people have found, the web desktop, once loaded, is pretty much
self-sufficient from that point onwards and then reacts snappily, even
over an Internet connection. So for the desktop, the issue is how to
improve the initial load time, and, as this debate has uncovered,
there are a number of solutions right now. With the two connection
limit being relaxed, this problem should also diminish over time.
That says to me that the web desktop, as an approach, is completely
viable for production systems, both within an intranet and on the
Internet
However, if you had to write and maintain all that desktop logic by
hand, forget it! It's a good example where the very high degree of
automation provided by EWD makes the use of complex Javascript widgets
feasible, practical and (most critically) easily maintainable.
Sukesh Hoogan
Voila!
FireFox : 15 seconds to load desktop page - with no scripting prompts
and one can fly with the rest of items.
IE - no luck.
Regards
Sukesh
Bombay, India
[Enterprise Resource Planning & Business Intelligence]