Archive for January, 2008

Flex Flowcharts

Published
by
wouter
on January 30, 2008
in Actionscript 3.0 and Flex
. 12 Comments

Last saturday I went to the Adobe Usergroup meeting in Gent (Belgium). It featured the Adobe Prerelease tour, Christophe’s presentation about Prana and, last but not least a presentation about lovely charts. Loverly Charts is an application to created flowcharts and diagrams online. This reminded me of a project I’ve been working on now and then the last 3 years. It doesn’t have a title / name yet, but it is a flowcharting application aswell.

You can created flowcharts, which are stored in a database. The flowcharts have metadata, like the perspon who is responsable for that chart, name, description, etc… Each step in a flowchart has metadata aswell. Charts can be linked to eachother, so you can describe a main proces which links to sub-processes aswell.

I’ve put a little demo online at: http://labs.aboutme.be/charts/

Enjoy!

benchmarking cakeswx/amfphp

Published
by
wouter
on January 20, 2008
in Actionscript 3.0, amfphp, cakephp, cakeswxphp and swx
. 1 Comment

Cakeswxphp enables you to use the cakphp rapid application framework as your remoting backend. No longer writing complex sqls, escaping query strings,… As some of you have noticed, cake does slow your remoting down a bit, as more classes are loaded to give you this ease-of-use. I did some benchmarks, comparing amfphp and swx with cakeswxphp 1.1 and cakeswxphp 1.2. I ran the echoData service 10 times, and took the average speed of those calls. These are the results:

SWX: 346ms
CakeSWXPHP 1.1: 350ms
CakeSWXPHP 1.2: 369ms
AMFPHP: 57ms
CakeAMFPHP 1.1: 111ms
CakeAMFPHP 1.2: 126ms

As we already know, AMFPHP is fast as hell. The CakePHP version is 2x slower because of the extra classes & functions cakephp executes. The difference between SWX and CakeSWX isn’t that big.

After that, I turned out eaccelerator (PHP caching / accelerator system) and ran the benchmark again:

SWX: 347ms
CakeSWXPHP 1.1: 364ms
CakeSWXPHP 1.2: 362ms
AMFPHP: 50ms
CakeAMFPHP 1.1: 64ms
CakeAMFPHP 1.2: 67ms

Not much difference between the first results without the caching, except for the Cake AMF gateway: it seems like using a php accelerator makes the cakeamfphp almost as fast as the native amfphp!

I’ve included the benchmark scripts:

cakeswxphp SWX benchmark
cakeswxphp AMF benchmark (AS3)