This is a story about LitePoint.Com and how they need to hire someone who can resolve their terribly messed-up Flash Builder 4 Code that cannot perform real-time charting of only 5000 data points.
Once upon a time a skilled software engineer went on an interview with the aforementioned company who said they wanted to hire someone who has worked with Charting Apps that chart a bunch of data points, in this case some 5000 every 250 ms. The skilled programmer told them he could do the work. They asked what past coding projects could they view as proof of the skill our rugged Hero said he had. All went well for the first part of the interview until… The two guys who had created their problems had their chance to interview our rugged Hero. Neither of those guys had any experience to speak of with Flash or Flex (Flash Builder 4 is really Flex).
One of these guys was a C++ programmer and neither knew anything about Object Finalization, as if knowing how to cause objects to be garbage collection is all that big of a deal – which it is not, of course. Let’s forget the fact that one need not be the least bit concerned about either object finalization nor garbage collection when performing real-time charting of 5000 data points every 250 ms – because none of that is the least bit required.
Let’s also forget the fact that one need not create a bunch of objects to get 5000 data points charted every 250 ms; unless someone tried to build their own charting display objects and they had no clue what they were doing.
Let’s also forget the fact that not only can Flash Builder 4 produce Apps that can chart 5000 data points every 250 ms one can also easily optimize this system to handle far more than just 5000 data points every 250 ms.
Let’s also forget the fact that our two llama C++ guys who caused their own problems were trying to convince their bosses that Flash Player cannot handle charting 5000 data points every 250 ms, as-if the only way to get this done would be to code it in C++.
Let’s also forget the fact that if one really wanted to one could shove C++ code into a Flash App to get the performance up, if one had to do so. It’s called Alchemy, not that those two Llama’s had any clue about this aspect of Flash anyway.
So now that we have chosen to ignore all the facts we can focus on the solution which by the by only required 12 hours time to build but then this is how a skilled programmer handles such trivial tasks as charting 5000 data points every 250 ms. This is worth 12 hours because this is a non-issue for Flash Builder 4.
See also: Charting Demo – go ahead and download it. The published version handles 5000 data points every 250 ms with ease. The simplest of optimizations could easily boost performance to 20,000 data points every 250 ms with ease. Additional optimizations would result in 50,000 or more data points charted every 250 ms, also with ease. Just in case Flash Player might prove too slow one could always achieve this goal using any number of techniques capable of displaying 30 charting updates per second by using some optimization techniques any suitably skilled programmer should be able to manage with ease.
Anyway, Charting Demo took 12 hours to build – time-permitting some additional features may be added such as a slick Dashboard with gauges and dials to show the performance. It would also be nice to boost the performance as high as possible just to prove this can be done with Flash.
Moral of the story is… if you need to hire someone to fix your problems you might as well hire the guy who says he can get the work done… who knows he might even get it done right away and save you some money OR you can just live with your problems and keep on interviewing until you find Mr. Perfect who may or may not be able to get the job done. Either way, this is nothing but a trivial problem for those who are suitably skilled – the rest cause the problems without knowing how to fix them.
BTW – The skilled programmer who wanted to fix these problems for that wayward company has also NEVER created a problem he could not fix – hey, I am talking about myself anyway in the 3rd person – this is a story so deal with the literary stuff however you wish… those who create problems they cannot fix should also not piss those off who can fix whatever problems anyone may care to create.
It should be noted Charting Demo was created with a couple Frameworks (Flex and the Google App Engine) that don’t exist anywhere else; Flash Builder 4 for the client and Python/Django 1.1 for the server. Reusable code make Application Development a breeze – 12 hours is pretty quick for any development effort and this one has some pretty cool features – all those features are 100% reusable. No reason to spend time reinventing the wheel – unless you are in Corporate America and cannot figure-out how to make your code reusable.
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