Wednesday, August 31, 2011

PAW - I18N & Native Mapper

It might seem that there is no process concerning PAW, but actually I'm quite busy :)
My plans are to release a 1.0 version this year. In October PAW will be two years under development and I think it's time to leave beta.

Things I'm currently working on are internationalization and what I call Native Mapping.

Internationalization
Currently I'm translating the web interface into German. This will result in a Java properties file with key and value pairs.
After this is finished it should be quite easy to make a translation for any language.
Translation takes much longer than I thought and I'm sure there will be a lot of mistakes in the first version.

Native Mapper
The PAW BeanShell approach has the advantage of being very flexible but when it comes to performance it's really slow.
As I showed in a previous blog post BeanShell is considerably slower than the same native code.
The Native Mapper is an approach to solve this dilemma.

The Mapper is comparable to a Servlet mapping in a JEE environment. The Native Mapper is implemented as Brazil Handler that sits in front of the BeanShell Handler and redirects URLs to native code (DEXed classes).

Handler Chain

The next version of PAW will use the mapper to speed up the generation of graphics inside the web application. This includes the generation of icons, contact images, album covers and the load graph.
Because some versions of HoneyComb have the problem that the DEX classloader is not working the original BeanShell code is also available. So if the Native Mapper fails to initialize (because the DEX classes are not available), the old BeanShell code is used.

A good example to show the possible speed-up when the Native Mapper is used is the Installed Apps page of the web application. On my Nexus One it shows 131 icons. Without Native Mapper this takes 90 seconds, with Native Mapper only 10.

Speed Test (time in seconds)

I hope to release the new version in the next couple of weeks ... stay tuned :)