How Efficient is Your Application?
One of the things I find energizing about software development today is the possibility of massive deployment. No longer are we restricted to a specific platform for everything we write. It is possible to write code, and with some forethought and a little tweaking have it able to run on phones, pads, pods, tables, PCs and maybe even a mainframe.
It could be the browser that makes this possible; languages shared across multiple platforms; or libraries that compile to host specific requirements, sharing your same source. Who knows how it is done in every situation? Not relevant.
What may be relevant now is the fact that your application may be executed on a machine with limited resources, and you may not have taken that into account. Power, CPU, and Network are all limited resources. This becomes especially true on mobile devices with vastly different resources than other platforms.
I know I had to remove an online music service from my wife’s smart phone because it drained her battery in 30 minutes. She could either listen to music for a while, or use her phone for calling people. That’s not a choice most of us are willing to make with our smart devices.
Visual Studio 2013 CTP announced that one of the new features would be an Energy Consumption tool. Now you can estimate the energy used by your app for memory, CPU and network. I find that pretty cool. Frankly, I hadn’t thought of that. I’m sure many of us will start to become concerned now, or in the near future. Almost any company is at least asking the question, “Should we support Apps on tablets or smart phones?”
What do you think? Is energy that big of a deal? Are we going to have to worry about the footprint of our application, or will hardware vendors solve the problem by providing more resources? Is energy really our problem? Leave your thoughts below or share them through sending an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Re: How Many New Programming Languages Do we Need?
Ray Writes:
Call it lack of hardware technology (or needing hardware tweaks) or lack of programming language, the web apps do need a unified language to integrate all different web server platforms (app server, load balancers, sessions handlers, security etc etc) and a plethora of clients Internet Explorer (leader once upon a time, following now), Chrome (good, but still gets the Aw … screen) and Firefox (javascript supported * Only *) and Safari (god knows what goes inside the mobile db and stays there or moves along FIFO or LIFO).
What we need here is a new language (or a new technology to support itself) to support all these loose ends hanging desperately from the cloud (since everything is in cloud now-a-days). And add to it the woes of mobile browsers on Android and IOS and what WebOS and … goes on.
We should be impressed that most apps do work almost everywhere. But we still feel there’s something missing. In this hour of need, we do need a magic bullet to solve all these problems. I think it is asking for too much, like asking for a executable to run on Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac etc. Java did provide an excellent platform but its still a platform and we have seen it not solving all the problems.
Lets hope we discover that language (the de facto standard) for the web (HTML does not cater to all needs , scripting does not cater to all needs, Java, ActiveX, web apps technology does not cater to all needs.) as the universal savior of all developers and providers. Write once and relax with total piece of mind.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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