Benchmarking AssemblyScript for Faster Web Applications

As web applications are becoming increasingly complex, it is crucial now more than ever to be able to develop web apps with an emphasis on performance to ensure a responsive and smooth user experience. Since the introduction of Webassembly as a compilation target for the web, the promise of writing programs that can run at native speed seemed revolutionary in theory. But the real world performance benefits of Webassembly in comparison to Javascript is not clearly understood. This paper evaluates the current performance of Assemblyscript - a strict subset of TypeScript that compiles to Webassembly, and Javascript in the areas of numerical computing across multiple browsers. A set of benchmarks were developed in Assemblyscript that includes numerical computing problems from the Ostrich Benchmark suite. The tests were executed across Chrome and Firefox. After studying the results from the benchmarks that were created, we find that Assemblyscript demonstrates speedups that range between 1.1-7.2x. It is also noticed that writing idiomatic Typescript can slow down Assemblyscript in certain scenarios. In conclusion, this study suggests that Assemblyscript (and Webassembly) provides far more consistent and predictable performance in comparison to Javascript

Web performance evaluation of high volume streaming data visualization

Many software and hardware applications generate an increasing volume of data and logs in real-time. Visual analytics is essential to support system monitoring and analysis of such data. For example, the world's largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), is expected to generate an estimated 160 TB a second of raw data captured from different sources. Transporting large amounts of data from distributed sources to a web browser for visualization is time-consuming due to data transport latencies. In addition, visualizing real-time data in the browser is challenging and limited by the data rates which a web browser can handle. We propose a novel low latency data streaming architecture, which uses a messaging system for real-time data transport to the web browser. Based on this architecture, we propose techniques and provide a tool for analyzing the performance of serialization protocols and the web-visualization rendering pipeline. We empirically evaluate the performance of our architecture using three visualizations use cases relevant to the SKA. Our system proved extremely useful in streaming high-volume data in real-time with low latency and greatly enhanced the web-visualization performance by enabling streaming an optimal number of data points to different visualizations

Windows-pohjaisen myyntikonfiguraattorin muuntaminen web-pohjaiseksi sovellukseksi

Sales configrator is a key component of a home builder ERP system. In a typical sales meeting the home buyer sits down with a sales representative to select where the home should be build, what kind of home will be build and what extra options will be selected. The configurator needs to be able to calculate correct prices, enable/disable options based on rule sets and store the selections to a permanent storage. Traditionally this meeting has been organized at the home builder's premises using a desktop computer but further flexibility is often needed. It is a general trend that traditional platform dependent applications have been migrated to web applications. There are several benefits for the users to be able to run applications in a web browser on most of the devices they might use without the need to install any application on their devices. The continuous development of different web framework technologies have made this possible and easier than ever before. The goal of this thesis is to migrate an old Windows native sales configurator to a web application and to find out what benefits such migration is expected to yield and what kinds of obstacles need to be overcome. This thesis presents one possible way to create a web application UI using React web development framework and the back-end server access using ODATA web API. This thesis also presents two different ways (code quality measurements and performance evaluation) to measure the success of an application migration from Windows native C\# WebForms application to a JavaScript based web application.Myyntikonfiguraattori on tärkeässä roolissa omakotitalorakennuttajille suunnatuissa toiminnanohjausjärjestelmissä. Tyypillisesti myyntitapahtumassa kodin ostaja istuu välittäjän kanssa konfiguraattorin äärellä ja valitsee, minkälaisen talon hän haluaa, mihin se tulee rakentaa ja minkälaisia lisävalintoja ostaja mahdollisesti haluaa. Konfiguraattorin tehtävä on laskea talolle oikea hinta, näyttää/piilottaa valinnat niihin liittyvien sääntöjen perusteella ja tallettaa asiakkaan valinnat johonkin pysyvään tietokantaan. Perinteisesti tämä tapaaminen on järjestetty talonrakennuttajan tiloissa pöytäkoneen äärellä, mutta nykyään tapaaminen usein halutaan järjestää joustavammin asiakkaan ehdoilla. Nykysuuntauksen mukaisesti ohjelmistoja kehitetään usein suoraan web-sovelluksiksi tai vanhoja alustariippuvaisia sovelluksia muunnetaan web-sovelluksiksi. Kyvyssä ajaa sovellusta selaimessa on useita hyötyjä kuten se, että web-sovelluksia voi ajaa eri laitteilla eivätkä ne vaadi käyttäjää asentamaan mitään niihin. Erilaisten web-kehitystekniikoiden kehitys on tehnyt monimutkaisten web-sovellusten tekemisestä mahdollista ja helpompaa kuin koskaan aikaisemmin. Tämän diplomityön tavoitteena on muuntaa vanha Windows-pohjainen myyntikonfiguraattori web-sovellukseksi sekä samalla tutkia, mitä hyötyjä muuntamisesta on ja minkälaisia haasteita muuntamiseen sisältyy. Tämä diplomityö esittää yhden mahdollisen toteutustavan käyttäen React web-kehitysympäristöä sekä ODATA web-ohjelmointirajapintaa. Tässä työssä esitetään myös kaksi eri tapaa (koodin laadun estimointi ja suorituskyvyn evaluointi), joilla tämänkaltaisen muunnostyön onnistumista voi arvioida ja mitata

Contributos para o Desenvolvimento de uma Plataforma Web para Sistema de Consultas por Telemedicina

Atualmente a Telemedicina consiste na prática de cuidados médicos à distância, utilizando uma chamada de vídeo e/ou voz. Esta é especialmente útil para populações que vivem em zonas rurais ou para pessoas que sofrem de dificuldades de mobilidade. Este projeto propõe-se a criar um dispositivo portátil de telemedicina focado na medicina física e de reabilitação, permitindo ao paciente a sua utilização no seu meio familiar sem ser preciso a sua deslocação para junto de um profissional de saúde. O protótipo já existente necessita do desenvolvimento de uma plataforma de comunicação médica com o paciente. A minha contribuição consiste no estudo e desenvolvimento da referida plataforma, ao nível de experiência de utilizador, como também na incorporação de algumas funcionalidades na mesma, como a de comunicação por vídeo e de instruções demonstrativas do médico para o paciente.Currently, Telemedicine is the practice of remote medical care through video and/or voice calls. It is especially useful for populations living in rural areas or for people who suffer from mobility difficulties. This project aims to create a portable telemedicine device focused on physical medicine and rehabilitation, allowing the patient to use it in his family environment without having to turn to a health professional. The already existing prototype yet requires the development of a medical communication platform with the patient. My contribution consists in the study and development of the platform in terms of user experience, as well as the incorporation of some functionalities on it, such as video communication and demonstrative instructions from the doctor to the patient

Hardware Accelerated Text Display

Web browsers and e-book are some of the most dominant applications on mobile devices today. They spend a significant amount of time handling text in these documents. Based on the experimental results from different commercial web browsers, the majority of the time spent to display text is dedicated to layout design and painting the bitmaps of the character glyphs on the screen; the time needed to rasterize the bitmaps of these glyphs is negligible. Many efforts have been made in software to improve the performance of text layout and display and very few are trying to come up with parallel processing schemes for System-On-Chip (SoC) designs to better handle this graphic processing. This work introduces a new novel hardware-software hybrid algorithm which performs the layout design of text and displays it faster by using a small piece of hardware which can easily be added to the SoCs of today\u27s mobile devices. This work also introduces a novel method for applying kerning to layout design process. The performance of the algorithms are compared to WebKit, the most widely used web rendering framework, and has resulted in a 29X and 192X performance increases in layout design when kerning is both used and not used respectively