Monday, December 09, 2002

.NET remoting vs. ASP.NET web services. i've been reading more about these two frameworks recently. .NET remoting is meant to provide a rich remoting framework for components, including pass-by-reference, various activation modes, and seamless support for the various System.Types, whereas ASP.NET provides a by-the-book web services implementation. i don't think there's any technical reason why these two goals couldn't have been achieved by a *single* framework rather than two. 11:58:23 PM    comment []

Electric XML vs. MSXML benchmark (CLR/JVM). i did another benchmark for fun tonite, parsing a small (12-line) XML file using Electric XML running on CLR (compiled using J#) versus the same file using the native microsoft XML parser MSXML. surprisingly enough, Electric XML was twice as fast in all of my simple tests, whether the parsers were called from J# or C#. the contents of the file was read just once into a string, and then the string was parsed 50,000 times to generate an accurate value. Electric XML parsed the string in 0.14 milliseconds, and MSXML parsed the string in 0.28 milliseconds. not a big deal, but an interesting result. Electric XML running on a JVM parses the same string in just 0.09 milliseconds. so EXML running on a JVM is three times faster than MSXML on a CLR, at least for small files. what about MSXML running on a JVM? hah, hah, trick question! ;-) 11:52:43 PM    comment []

about a month ago i made the decision to bring in a seasoned CEO to run the mind electric. it's always tempting as a founder to stay in the CEO role, but if you're a technologist such as myself, there is absolutely no way to run a company and continue to play a lead technical role. in addition, i'm the first to admit that michael broderick's CEO skills are way beyond my own! it is really great to be able to focus 100% on my lead architect role. 1:05:35 AM    comment []

we got GLUE 3.3 beta 1 out of the door on friday evening. there is a lot of new stuff in this release, with even more coming in beta 2. i'm already excited and looking forward to working on GLUE 4.0! 1:02:37 AM    comment []

i ordered books for visual J#, visual C# and the .NET framework today. i'm really looking forward to figuring out how to do *deep* GAIA integration with .NET as opposed to some basic surface stuff. i get the impression that GLUE has a more dynamic "do-stuff-at-runtime" architecture than the .NET web services framework. 1:00:57 AM    comment []

i've been doing some .NET hacking today, just some initial basic probing. first of all, i got electric xml to compile using visual j#. it went very fast, with no changes required to the java source code in order to run under CLR. i was able to run some benchmarks of EXML under JVM vs. CLR. under the JVM, it was about twice as fast as under CLR. i've been told this is mostly due to the wrapping of native CLR strings to expose them as Java objects. the next thing i did was to try and convert the EXML java source code to C# using the conversion assistant beta 2. there were quite a few things that could not be automatically converted, including: - use of Reader.mark() - use of clone() (would need to implement the System.ICloneable i think) - use of BufferedWriter (would need to move to the .NET BufferedStream instead) i estimate it would take about 2 days to complete the conversion to C#, at which point it would be interesting to run the benchmark again, as well as compare it against the .NET framework XML parser. the biggest things would be changes to the use Reader/Writer classes. it's not a priority item right now, so i don't think i'll bother. 12:58:31 AM    comment []