Consider this:

I measured the time needed to create 200 Buttons in RAP 1.4 and RAP 1.5M3, and it shows a considerable performance boost (at least for the browsers i tested). One reason for this is that we changed from quirksmode to standard rendering in IE9, which among other things, finally allowes us to use its new HTML5-features (in this case SVG and CSS3). I expect another little boost with IE10, which has even more CSS3 support.

However, what i did not expect was a significant improvement in any other browser, in this case Google Chrome. This is likely due to the implementation of the JSON-based RAP-protocol. It remains to be seen how this develops, as work on the protocol is still going on. Currently eval() is used to parse the JSON. In the final release we will probably use other methods, such as the native JSON-parser present in many modern browser. Older browser may gain only little or no performance.

What is really awesome though is the improvment of the GC/SWT-Canvas performance in IE9 (and only IE9). Drawing in browser (without any plug-ins) used to be a real pain. While other browser adopted the HTML5-Canvas and SVG standard very early on, Microsoft stubbornly stuck to its horribly old VML implementation, making my work needlessly hard. One of the main problems with VML is that it gets exponentially slower the more elements you draw, from about 200 elements on it’s almost painful to watch. But this is 2011, HTML5 is all the buzz, and even MS could no longer ignore it. IE9 now has a decent HTML5-Canvas implementation that we use in RAP 1.5, and it shows:

The fine print:
These results were achieved on my Windows 7/64bit Intel i5 2,4 GHZ laptop. No other systems or browser were tested. Measurement was done using JavaScript. The 32bit version of IE9 was used. I did only 3 iterations each, but the deviance was relatively small. The results in the final RAP 1.5 release my be very different due to ongoing development. You can check out the code i used here.

Tags: canvas, CSS3, html5, IE9, Internet Explorer, rap

I have to admit, I’m a little nervous what happens with the RAP community after this post. At least for me, the last days were pretty exciting. Some days ago, Ivan from the RAP team committed the initial support for a GC (GraphicsContext) for RAP. Currently restricted to the Canvas widget, the GC provides thousands of new use cases for RAP applications. The work by Ivan and Tim is just gorgeous and will help many developers to single-source their applications with even less exceptions. In case you want to try it out in this second without reading further, just fire up the RAP Examples demo and draw something yourself

Credits for the picture above goes to Holger with the aim to come up with a new RAP project logo After using the GC the first time in the Examples demo, I thought about other possibilities to test the new GC. My first thought: custom widgets? Tired of writing custom widgets in JavaScript? Get your Canvas and single-source your custom widget with RCP by writing an owner-draw widget. But as it was late in the night, I decided to just reuse some existing owner-drawn widgets like those we can find in the Nebula project. After getting the PShelf widget from CVS, it was only a matter of seconds until I started my first RAP application using an owner-drawn Nebula widget:

And I think I know what most of you are currently thinking – Draw2D, GEF and GMF on RAP? To keep it and short and simple: No! While it may be possible to single source Draw2D with the exisiting Canvas, I’m pretty sure it will not scale. The way Draw2D is implemented will cause major performance problems with the browser-side Canvas widget. As I said, it may be possible but not really preferable. For supporting Draw2D the right technology on the client-side is there. Only on the server-side we would need APIs that entirely hide the GC. Thus we could directly translate from one vector-based technology to the other.

I’m pretty excited to see how the community can profit from the new Canvas implementation. Want to try it out? Either get the current RAP runtime from CVS or wait some days until we can publish RAP M7 (which has several other cool new & noteworthy items).

Tags: canvas, draw2d, eclipseRT, gef, helios, nebula, new and noteworthy, rap, Single Sourcing