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Adobe AIR: Calculator

If you’ve installed the AIR SDK (and it’s dead easy, just extract and copy it somewhere), you’ve got a lightweight cross-plaform VM to program apps in. Best of all, it works with HTML and Javascript.

In about an hour, I hitched up a calculator application. It’s very easy:

Calculator.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.0.M4"
	appId="in.vish.Calculator"
	version="1.0">
	<name>Calculator</name>
	<title>Calculator Installer</title>
	<description>Simple Calculator in HTML</description>
	<copyright></copyright>
	<rootContent systemChrome="standard" transparent="false" visible="true">
		Calculator.html
	</rootContent>
</application>

Calculator.html:

<!DOCTYPE html
     PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
	<title>Calculator</title>
	<style>
		body, html { margin: 0; padding: 0; }
		body { background-color: black; color: #888; line-height: 1.5em;
			font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;
		}
		#wrap { margin: auto; width: 70%; }
		h1 { font-family: Tahoma, Arial, serif; font-size:2em; color: orange; }
		#sum_button { margin-top: 5px; }
	</style>
	<script>
		init = function() {
			runtime.trace("init function called");
		}
		calculate = function() {
			runtime.trace("calculate called!");
			value1 = document.getElementById('val1').value;
			value2 = document.getElementById('val2').value;
			sum_value = parseInt(value1) + parseInt(value2);
			if (isNaN(sum_value)) {
				document.getElementById('result').innerHTML = "You didn't enter valid numbers.";
			} else {
				document.getElementById('result').innerHTML = "The sum is " + sum_value + ".";
			}
		}
		resetForm = function() {
			runtime.trace("resetForm called!");
			document.getElementById('sum').reset();
		}
	</script>
</head>
<body onload="init()">
	<div id="wrap">
		<h1>Calculate a Sum!</h1>
		<form id="sum">
			<label for="val1">Value 1:
				<input type="text" name="val1" id="val1" size="4"/>
			</label>
			<label for="val2">Value 2:
				<input type="text" name="val2" id="val2" size="4"/>
			</label>
			<input type="button" value="Sum!" id="sum_button" onclick="calculate();">
			<input type="button" value="Reset" onclick="resetForm();">
			<p id="result"></p>
		</form>
	</div>
</body>
</html>

And voila, there you have it: a simple calculator:

There’s also a zip file with the code: calculator.zip and the AIR file for installation (to use that you need the AIR runtime)

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JRuby/Glassfish Investigation

I’ve been keeping an eye on the JRuby scene for a while now and I recently went about benchmarking again. JRuby is interesting because it has the potential to bring robust Java deployment and tools to the Ruby world.

I made a simple widgets application as outlined here and installed JRuby/Glassfish as outlined here (both great articles at AD TechFL) and then proceeded to benchmark:

Glassfish/Jruby on httperf:

Elena:~/Applications/jruby/lib vishnu$ time httperf --client=0/1 --server=localhost --port=8080 --uri=/jruby-demo/widgets/list --send-buffer=4096 --recv-buffer=16384 --num-conns=480 --rate=60
httperf --client=0/1 --server=localhost --port=8080 --uri=/jruby-demo/widgets/list --rate=60 --send-buffer=4096 --recv-buffer=16384 --num-conns=480 --num-calls=1
httperf: warning: open file limit > FD_SETSIZE; limiting max. # of open files to FD_SETSIZE
Maximum connect burst length: 2

Total: connections 480 requests 480 replies 480 test-duration 7.999 s

Connection rate: 60.0 conn/s (16.7 ms/conn, <=7 concurrent connections)
Connection time [ms]: min 1.4 avg 24.6 max 251.3 median 15.5 stddev 35.7
Connection time [ms]: connect 0.1
Connection length [replies/conn]: 1.000

Request rate: 60.0 req/s (16.7 ms/req)
Request size [B]: 83.0

Reply rate [replies/s]: min 60.0 avg 60.0 max 60.0 stddev 0.0 (1 samples)
Reply time [ms]: response 24.5 transfer 0.0
Reply size [B]: header 360.0 content 1077.0 footer 0.0 (total 1437.0)
Reply status: 1xx=0 2xx=438 3xx=0 4xx=0 5xx=42

CPU time [s]: user 1.42 system 5.79 (user 17.7% system 72.4% total 90.1%)
Net I/O: 89.1 KB/s (0.7*10^6 bps)

Errors: total 0 client-timo 0 socket-timo 0 connrefused 0 connreset 0
Errors: fd-unavail 0 addrunavail 0 ftab-full 0 other 0

real    0m8.008s
user    0m1.418s
sys     0m5.799s

Glassfish/Jruby on ab:

Elena:~/Applications/jruby/lib vishnu$ ab -n400 http://localhost:8080/jruby-demo/widgets/show/1
This is ApacheBench, Version 1.3d  apache-1.3
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking localhost (be patient)
Completed 100 requests
Completed 200 requests
Completed 300 requests
Finished 400 requests
Server Software:        Sun
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            8080

Document Path:          /jruby-demo/widgets/show/1
Document Length:        611 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   8.551 seconds
Complete requests:      400
Failed requests:        0
Broken pipe errors:     0
Total transferred:      397600 bytes
HTML transferred:       244400 bytes
Requests per second:    46.78 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       21.38 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       21.38 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          46.50 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connnection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0     0    0.0      0     0
Processing:    13    21   52.6     16  1019
Waiting:       13    21   52.6     16  1019
Total:         13    21   52.6     16  1019

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     16
  66%     17
  75%     17
  80%     17
  90%     18
  95%     20
  98%     37
  99%    116
 100%   1019 (last request)

Let’s compare. Here’s how a single Mongrel/C does with httperf:

Elena:~/Applications/jruby/lib vishnu$ time httperf --client=0/1 --server=localhost --port=3000 --uri=/widgets/list --send-buffer=4096 --recv-buffer=16384 --num-conns=480 --rate=30
httperf --client=0/1 --server=localhost --port=3000 --uri=/widgets/list --rate=30 --send-buffer=4096 --recv-buffer=16384 --num-conns=480 --num-calls=1
httperf: warning: open file limit > FD_SETSIZE; limiting max. # of open files to FD_SETSIZE
Maximum connect burst length: 3

Total: connections 480 requests 480 replies 480 test-duration 16.009 s

Connection rate: 30.0 conn/s (33.4 ms/conn, <=18 concurrent connections)
Connection time [ms]: min 9.0 avg 56.4 max 607.6 median 9.5 stddev 99.4
Connection time [ms]: connect 0.2
Connection length [replies/conn]: 1.000

Request rate: 30.0 req/s (33.4 ms/req)
Request size [B]: 72.0

Reply rate [replies/s]: min 29.4 avg 29.8 max 30.0 stddev 0.3 (3 samples)
Reply time [ms]: response 55.7 transfer 0.5
Reply size [B]: header 278.0 content 1011.0 footer 0.0 (total 1289.0)
Reply status: 1xx=0 2xx=480 3xx=0 4xx=0 5xx=0

CPU time [s]: user 3.91 system 11.35 (user 24.4% system 70.9% total 95.3%)
Net I/O: 39.9 KB/s (0.3*10^6 bps)

Errors: total 0 client-timo 0 socket-timo 0 connrefused 0 connreset 0
Errors: fd-unavail 0 addrunavail 0 ftab-full 0 other 0

real    0m16.017s
user    0m3.912s
sys     0m11.354s

And Mongrel/C with ab:

Elena:~/Applications/jruby/lib vishnu$ ab -n400 http://localhost:3000/widgets/list
This is ApacheBench, Version 1.3d  apache-1.3
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking localhost (be patient)
Completed 100 requests
Completed 200 requests
Completed 300 requests
Finished 400 requests
Server Software:        Mongrel
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            3000

Document Path:          /widgets/list
Document Length:        1011 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   7.974 seconds
Complete requests:      400
Failed requests:        0
Broken pipe errors:     0
Total transferred:      515600 bytes
HTML transferred:       404400 bytes
Requests per second:    50.16 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       19.93 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       19.93 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          64.66 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connnection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0     0    0.0      0     0
Processing:     9    19   63.4     11  1167
Waiting:        9    19   63.4     11  1167
Total:          9    19   63.4     11  1167

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     11
  66%     12
  75%     12
  80%     12
  90%     13
  95%     15
  98%    113
  99%    149
 100%   1167 (last request)

Observations

  • Advantage: For the same number of connections, Glassfish/Jruby versus a single instance Mongrel/C has twice the reply rate in half the benchmark time.
  • Disadvantage: Request latency is more for Glassfish/Jruby. (around 5ms av. more)
  • Disadvantage: JRuby Ruby/Rails support is not perfect but very good.
  • Advantage: Much simpler to set up. Copy the war file to the server and deployment is done, autodeployment is also possible w/o restarting Glassfish.
  • Advantage: Much simpler to install and get going on the server, just requires a JDK, glassfish installed anywhere, etc.
  • Advantage: Runs on Java, so Java deployment experience will do.
  • Disadvantage: Does not support C library extensions for Ruby, question: how many of them are there & useful (memcached?) ?
  • Advantage: Supports Java libraries kind of easily, again question: how many of them are there, useful and relevant?
  • Question: This benchmark is versus a single mongrel, how does cluster vs. cluster compare?
  • Question: Is glassfish clustering easy? Observation: mongrel clustering is cumbersome at present. Maybe swiftiply will help there with dynamic addition of mongrels?
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New picture

So the old mustache was getting to be a bit long in the tooth, so I have a new stainglass one. To go with it, a tightened sidebar too. What do you guys think?