Waldo Smeets .com

Matt Chotin is hosting the first official session of MAX 2004 on Flex and large data sets. He presents on the principles behind his large dataset applications that he has posted on his website.

Live log (I am not typing over the slides here, that would be too much):

08:00 Matt starts off with a powerpoint presentation explaining the differences between Paging, Lazy Loading and Preloading

08:30 Nice tip that I was not aware of yet; you can disable live scrolling of contents in for example a datagrid. This way users can scroll the scrollbar but the content does only ‘refresh’ when the users releases the scrollbar (instead of doing it live whilst scrolling). This is a great way of improving performance and proves very helpfull when applying data retrieval techniques (ie because live scrolling is disabled you do not have to download all the data of a recordset, you only download the data that are required when the contents is ‘refreshed’ and when you have implemented your own getItemAt() for a custom dataprovider.

08:45 Cool news: tooltips on scrollbars is now build in Flex 1.5 by default.

08:50 New features in Flex 1.5 that allow you to replace a repeater with better performing lists (lists in 1.5 have improved greatly)

08:52 Perceived performance is a very important thing to keep in mind when you *know* that your app needs to wait a while for data to be processed. (tip: also see the whitepaper on performance on the Macromedia Flex DevNet).

08:56 Since 1.5 is now AMF only there is the benefit of using Object.registerClass(). Apparently this includes a 15 percent performance improvement compared to ‘old’ ways of working with custom data classes.

08:57 Q &A & Applaus!