A month after the first release of Web 2.0, Xojo has released a maintenance update. Unfortunately, the slow workings of a Web 2.0 App have not been addressed.
I understand it will not be a small feat to fix this one. As described in my previous post, the problem is in the core design of their framework (especially the event system) and I can not believe anybody at Xojo hasn’t been able to predict this would cause problems, especially when bigger Web apps with lots of dynamically created components will be build. All we have seen now is very small ones and even there the problem already shows.
For example here is a run of such a new small app named Showcase. Note that I have a 200Mbps broadband internet connection and speed has never been an issue.
Xojo is giving as the main reasons for such slow behavior the distance from the server, latency, number of hops and the quality of your network connection. Well, of course that may be a variable in the equation! But, this is something EVERY web app builder has to take into account. You can not assume your users are living next door to your server. That is why the golden rule is: avoid many roundtrips to the server at all costs!
But here is the rub: this is exactly what Xojo’s event system does by design. As demonstrated in my previous post, adding 100 components does 200+ roundtrips to the server, it even happens for events like shown and hidden.
I can’t see an immediate fix for this problem. Maybe HTTP/2 could help a bit, or WebSockets, or doing stuff in batch making less requests? Or maybe there just isn’t one quick fix and going back to the whiteboard and rethink the whole event system is the only right decision in the long run. Anyhow, action will be needed from Xojo if they want Web 2.0 to succeed. There is little point in evaluating the other things in Web 2.0 without this being addressed first.
Alwaysbusy
Alwaysbusy's Corner 