v8 Javascript Virtual Machine: Welcome in the new era of the web

First let’s see what is this mysterious thing which has been included in Google Chrome and , well, created a smaller storm amongst the developers. Well, maybe it was only a wind. Or whisper?

It’s a C++ engine which can be embedded in any other C++ application freely. It parses the Javascript (ECMA-262 standard), collects the memory garbage (small chunks of memory which are a result of closed processes) and handles memory allocation. It should speed up script execution a big time.

Google claims that Chrome, thanks to V8 is 10 times faster than Firefox 3.0 . As Darren Hobbs states on his blog, you can optimize a code for a benchmark, so maybe Google’s benchmarks are not as accurate as they state. Anyway, a quick test on a Javascript Benchmarking tool gave the following results:

• Firefox 3.0 — 27535.2ms +/- 7.0%
• Chrome — 5127.6ms +/- 3.7% (WOW!)
• Safari (win) — 9317.6ms +/- 9.4%
• IE 7.0 — 81825.4ms +/- 3.0%

That means that it’s not 10 times faster, but only 5. Not that it’s not enough!
By the way, see the IE result? Impressive, I have to admit, it’s the slowest browser when talking about Javascript.

I’m not a C developer, I know only basic stuff, but when I saw the V8 source code I was amazed! The assembly code is generated dynamically. I always knew this is possible, I even heard that it’s an extremely effective way to create high performance applications, I just never used it. For me it’s quite hard to understand though. But as for the applications, it’s a very effective way.

So, the verdict on V8: the test talks for itself, the Chrome engine thanks to V8 and WebKit is extremely fast Javascript executor, the code behind V8 is designed to be very fast, it follows the current standards.

If you develop some application which could use the V8 engine, I say try it. You can only win.

What do you think about the Gears Geolocation API

What you see on the top of the sidebar is not server side code. More than that, not even a bit of PHP has been used. In fact, even HTML is almost not present. It’s Gears and its GeoLocation API.

When you allow Devoracles to collect some data about you, more exactly your location on the Earth, Gears queries Google about your location. Again, not even a bit of server side code on Devoracles’s side.

This is the GeoLocation API of Gears. And What can be used for? Think about AdSense, for the matter of the example. It always knows where you are. OK, almost always.

Any thoughts on this API?

Devoracles.com is now Gears enabled!

Great day today! Well, for me it’s sure it is: I finally finished incorporating Gears in Devoracles’s back-end software.

It’s not so interesting for you, the end-user. Probably if there wouldn’t be a pop-up window asking for your permission to store files locally, you wouldn’t even know Devoracles.com is Gears enabled.

For me it’s very interesting because I finally managed to fully understand how to implement the localServer function of Gears 0.4. Currently I only try to minimize the load times by caching a huge amount of Javascript and images on the end-user’s side. Of course, this will be noticeable only for the returning visitors with Gears installed.
Then later, when I fully understand the whole stuff, I will try to use other functions too. I’m quite interested at the moment in the Gears’s GeoLocation functions… even though it’s beta, it could be very interesting.

Let me know if you notice some bug or mistake I made. Cheers
To learn more about Google’s Gears, we published recently an article about it which should enlighten you a bit, or if you a developer you can learn more at http://gears.google.com or http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/

The story of the mystical Gears

I was asked the other day to explain what is Google Gears (now only Gears) and why is it good anyway. So let’s see why Gears has been developed, what are its strenghts and in general what it is.

What is Google Gears

Gear is a software developed by Google and released under BSD license. It is open source and it seems Google hopes that it will be widely used by web developers. It was first released by some Google developers basically just because they got mad on how incredibly slow the modern web applications are, back in May 2007, and since then it arrived to its 0.4 version (which is included by default in Google Chrome by the way). It is supported by all the modern browsers, but the web applications also have to support it. This restricted a lot its use on non-Google websites.

What is Gears and what are its strenghts

Gears basically is a server, but on the end-user’s end. It can speed up the navigation of the complicated web-applications greatly by storing data on the user’s end and running client-side scripts asynchronously in the background and by serving some cached data from the local databases and caches, thus eliminating the data transfer between the application server and the end-user.

You can learn more about Gears on the official Gears Blog and on the official Gears Home