Forums

by Craig Shearer >> Thu, 7 Oct 1999 20:30:03 GMT

Something very interesting I've discovered about JADE Web-enabled applications.

Label controls are very expensive to use. You would naturally assume that a Label control would be pretty lightweight, and naturally use them on your web-deployed forms. Unfortunately this is not the case!

The reason is that Label controls are very inefficient to generate HTML for. I suspect that it's because JADE has to check whether there is an event method behind each label control to determine whether to generate simple HTML or a link.

Here's some interesting figures:

A form with a single button takes 10ms to generate. Add a single label and it takes 70ms. A form with 10 labels takes 830ms. A form with 40 labels takes 2.6 seconds!!!

A WebHTML control instead which gives you static text as a Label control does, or gives you the option of writing some HTML yourself. What it doesn't give you is the ability to change the font, however, it would be pretty simple to subclass the control and give it this ability.

For comparison, replace the labels with the WebHTML control and the same form that took 2.6 seconds to generate now generates in 80ms!!!

Interesting huh?

Note: the test machine was a Pentium II, 333MHz with 128MB RAM.

Craig.

by Craig Shearer >> Thu, 7 Oct 1999 21:46:24 GMT

Further to this... the one disadvantage of using a WebHTML control is that it doesn't have font properties so you can only use the default font for the application.

However, since WebHTML is a subclass of the TextBox control, which does have font properties, you can just subclass WebHTML into (say) WebLabel, then turn the font properties back on using the "Design Time Properties" dialog (you need to show inherited). Give it a nice icon, such as the one I've attached to this post (which is a ripped off and hacked version of the JADE Label icon!) and you're all set!

Enjoy!

Craig.

by Chendra Segaran >> Thu, 7 Oct 1999 23:28:40 GMT

Craig,

You are right in that it is determining the hyperlink that takes the time. I am not sure whether your timings are based on Jade 4 or Jade 5. This has been improved in Jade 5 and has been further improved in Jade 5.0.14. A quick way of fixing the time taken to determine label hyperlinks is to disable the labels. No search for the click method is amde in this case.

Chendra.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Craig Shearer wrote in message ...
Further to this... the one disadvantage of using a WebHTML control is that it doesn't have font properties so you can only use the default font for the application.

However, since WebHTML is a subclass of the TextBox control, which does have font properties, you can just subclass WebHTML into (say) WebLabel, then turn the font properties back on using the "Design Time Properties" dialog (you need to show inherited). Give it a nice icon, such as the one I've attached to this post (which is a ripped off and hacked version of the JADE Label icon!) and you're all set!

Enjoy!

Craig.

by Craig Shearer >> Fri, 8 Oct 1999 1:03:55 GMT

Hi Chendra

This certainly seems like a better idea - rather than having to replace all my label controls with another control. I just did some tests (yes, this is on JADE 5.0.12) and got the following results:

40 of my subclassed WebHTML controls on a form - 80mS
40 disabled label controls on a form - 210mS.

So, the WebHTML subclass control is still faster, though unless you had a large number of label controls on a form, the difference probably isn't worth it. Still, it'd be interesting to work out why there is a difference. When you look at the generated HTML (View Source in the browser) it's generating virtually exactly the same HTML. Both the subclassed WebHTML control and tht Label control will be having to generate the HTML but one inserts the caption whereas the other inserts the text property.

Comments?

Craig.