First let me say that I really enjoyed your guest spot on RIA Weekly. I totally agree that moving RIA technology from the consumer to the enterprise space means that the technology will be faced with a different type of scaling challenge and it is going to be interesting to see what kinds of adaptations will take place.

I enjoy doing these kinds of extreme architectural experiments because it does make you think differently as a programmer and I love giving server administrators heart attacks.

So I was again inspired and wanted to give 10million rows a try. It resulted in a crazy big session state (not surprisingly) but did complete.
http://flickr.com/photos/tjung/2743001410/

I have the unfair advantage of a smallish server running my DB and App. server though. I'm pretty impressed that Curl was able to chew through a 1 million row CSV given the hardware you had it running on.

As to your question about Web Dynpro being RIA, Fat, or Fit client - it is closest to the last one. Web Dynpro produces a metadata based description of the UI and then different rendering engines can be applied to the same application at runtime. The video from my blog is the AJAX/DHTML rendering engine - but we also have an Adobe Flex based rendering engine and a .Net Desktop Client based rendering engine.

I have been playing with the Microsoft Grid for Silverlight and with the support for data and ui vitualization 1m records are displayed with no problem. Actually - you can display 15m records - it doesn't matter because of the virtualization support.

hi
in Adobe Flex, i've created a component that could handle virtually unlimited number of rows and columns. (limited only by biggest int value possible and physical memory)
http://v2.idubee.com/IdubeeClient.html
Press CTRL+m to insert million records
One cell takes only 8 bytes, and render time is O(1) (constant) for any number of cells.

Standard Flex DataGrid component also quite fast.

I worked with WebDynpro sometime ago. As I remember, it used some kind of ActiveX, so it's pretty much obese :)

>I worked with WebDynpro sometime ago. As I remember, it used some kind of ActiveX, so it's pretty much obese :)

Web Dynpro's main UI libraries don't use any ActiveX. The UI elements are implemented in AJAX and DHTML. We do have a couple of specialized controls - for example Microsoft Excel Integration and multiple file uploads - that use either ActiveX or Java Applets. These are pretty specific use cases however. Even the Adobe Interactive Forms elements have been changed from ActiveX to JavaScript based. The future direction for UI elements that can't be accomplished is JavaScript/HTML is to use the Islands technology that allows us to embed Flash/Flex and Silverlight directly into Web Dynpro.

We've had "stress tests" like these for SmartClient for several years. Trees are much harder by the way, try those sometime. Or very large numbers of columns (500 or more) - this requires bidirectional incremental rendering to scale. Or data cubes.

It's really hilarious to me to see plugin vendors make so much noise about performance and then be matched or surpassed by Ajax.

Ajax, Flash, Java and Curl scale to 1M+ rows. Now can we stop talking about naive benchmarks like this, because it would be foolish to load this much data up front in the types of applications these platforms target.

Real-world performance in a WAN environment comes from really intelligent data management, which reduces server round-trips, thereby reducing network traffic and database hits.

If you care about performance, evaluate a platform's data binding architecture and it's facilities for re-using already loaded data, managing caches, and performing client-side operations where possible. If you could benchmark, say, the Cairngorm architecture in Flex against SmartClient's (Ajax-based) databinding architecture, you'd find very large performance differences that actually affect real applications.

Hi Charles,

Thanks for commenting on the blog. I would like to see a demonstration of SmartClient handling 1 million records. Can you post an example? You say that Ajax surpasses the plug-ins - I would like to see an actual demonstration.

All the best,

Richard