Tools That Work Everywhere

Everywhere I go I take my laptop. Hopefully, WIFI is available or I have to use my phone's hotspot and data link. There was WIFI available here and as you can see, I have EclipseIDE up using XLr8Developer and XLr8Object Editor running in Central America on a villa in the bay. Do you know if your in-house tools can do this? Do you know if your Rocket Software supplied tools do this?

First, I will answer the latter. I had a replication failure for an unknown reason. I have a script that runs after the failure. The script failed to restart U2 Replication this time even though it has a sleep command and ran a couple of times.

I fire up U2admin and click on the subscriber account. From there I open the U2 Replication window and click on status. Once that window opens, I click on the start button to see what is happening. The "Rep. Status" column says NULL. The "Changed By" column says NULL. I click open the configuration and try to manually get it restarted with all options failing. I click on the publisher account server and try to get into the status window open which fails. So does that configuration window on the publisher as well.

Maybe U2logic's cloud website is down. I pull up the URL and find the website is up and our XLr8Monitor shows transactions from users and lots of other activity. This is not something I can fix via Rocket Software's U2admin tool from Central America.

After reading an article which quite dense on how JavaScript loads the DOM and CSS, it starts some out-of-the-box thinking on a problem I have seen initially with Chrome browser and now see on Firefox as well. Our web screens have a perceptible delay in being rendered on the browser. Maybe I can apply what I have learned from the JavaScript article to our web forms to speed up the process.

I fire up my XLr8Tools and log in to U2logic's development account. I use the database synchronization function to make sure I have all the changes that have been made since I last logged in. I use EclipseIDE to sync up with our SVN version control to make sure I am current with that too.

All of our forms are generated using our XLr8Tools whether it is a simple CRUD form or a more complex window entry form. Since we have over 300 forms any change will be a major reduction in resources on the client computer. These forms are generated using a UniBasic program that creates the HTML/JavaScript using the format from our JavaScript library company called Webix.

I pull up my HTML/JavaScript code and add the commands console.time() and console.endTime() to see how long it takes to render the form on the page. It takes about 100 milliseconds for this page. This time seems a little long to me but I am not sure since this is a complex form layout that had to be hand-coded.

I removed some of my old custom code added an if statement to branch around the generated code and loaded the new format code which consists of 100% of the old layout code without using the Webix command to myView.destructor(). The new code takes about 25 milliseconds to render or about 4 times faster.

I changed our UniBasic code to generate this new code for this form and 300 other forms. I started testing all of the new forms and they all work wonderfully. The nine forms that have custom layouts all load faster and test out as well.

As you can see by my description XLr8Tools worked perfectly even remotely and Rocket Software's tools failed for unknown reasons. From now on, I will add to U2logic's testing protocol that I have to have trips to Central America to test our tools before they are shipped.