Peterbe.com

A long time I go I wrote an angular app that was pleasantly straight forward. It loads all records from the server in one big fat AJAX GET. The data is large, ~550Kb as a string of JSON, but that's OK because it's a fat-client app and it's extremely unlikely to grow any multiples of this. Yes, it'll some day go up to 1Mb but even that is fine.

Once ALL records are loaded with AJAX from the server, you can filter the whole set and paginate etc. It feels really nice and snappy. However, the app is slightly smarter than that. It has two cool additional features...

1. Every 10 seconds it does an AJAX query to ask "Have any records been modified since {{insert latest modify date of all known records}}?" and if there's stuff, it updates.

2. All AJAX queries from the server are cached in the browser's local storage (note, I didn't write localStorage, "local storage" encompasses multiple techniques). The purpose of that is to that on the next full load of the app, we can at least display what we had last time whilst we wait for the server to return the latest and greatest via a slowish network request.

3. Suppose we have brand new browser with no local storage, because the default sort order is always known, instead of doing a full AJAX get of all records, it does a small one first: "Give me the top 20 records ordered by modify date" and once that's in, it does the big full AJAX request for all records. Thus bringing data to the eyes faster.

All of these these optimization tricks are accompanied with a flash message at the top that says: <img src="spinner.gif"> Currently using cached data. Loading all remaining records from server....

When I built this I decided to use localForage which is a convenience wrapper over localStorage AND IndexedDB that does it all asynchronously and with proper promises. And to make it work in AngularJS I used angular-localForage so it would work with Angular's cycle updates without custom $scope.$apply() stuff. I thought the advantage of this is that it being async means that the main event can continue doing important rendering stuff whilst the browser saves things to "disk" in the background.

Also, I was once told that localStorage, which is inherently blocking, has the risk that calling it the first time in a while might cause the browser to have to take a major break to boot data from actual disk into the browsers allocated memory. Turns out, that is extremely unlikely to be a problem (more about this is a future blog post). The warming up of fetching from disk and storing into the browser's memory happens when you start the browser the very first time. Chrome might be slightly different but I'm confident that this is how things work in Firefox and it has for many many months.

What's very important to note is that, by default, localForage will use IndexedDB as the storage backend. It has the advantage that it's async to boot and it supports much large data blobs.

So I timed, how long does it take for localForage to SET and GET the ~500Kb JSON data? I did that like this, for example:

var t0 = performance.now();
$localForage.getItem('eventmanager')
.then(function(data) {
    var t1 = performance.now();
    console.log('GET took', t1 - t0, 'ms');
    ...

The results are as follows:

Operation	Iterations	Average time
SET	4	341.0ms
GET	4	184.0ms

In all fairness, it doesn't actually matter how long it takes to save because my app actually doesn't depend on waiting for that promise to resolve. But it's an interesting number nevertheless.

So, here's what I did. I decided to drop all of that fancy localForage stuff and go back to basics. All I really need is these two operations:

// set stuff
localStorage.setItem('mykey', JSON.stringify(data))
// get stuff
var data = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem('mykey') || '{}')

So, after I've refactored my code and deleted (6.33Kb + 22.3Kb) of extra .js files and put some performance measurements in:

Operation	Iterations	Average time
SET	4	5.9ms
GET	4	3.3ms

Just WOW!
That is so much faster. Sure the write operation is now blocking, but it's only taking 6 milliseconds. And the reason it took IndexedDB less than half a second also probably means more hard work for it to sweat CPU over.

Sold? I am :)

Last year I put together a little experiment called AJAX or Not? and blogged about it here. The basic idea was to display 1,000 rows in a table. There are several ways of doing it but I decided to compare the following three patterns:

1. Rendering the whole table in Django server-side and return the whole HTML document.
2. Rendering a skeleton page, then load the table content as a big chunk of HTML via AJAX.
3. Rendering a skeleton page, and let AngularJS load all the content of the table from the server as JSON and let AngularJS render it into the DOM.

It was clear as day that the server-side rendering version was hands down the fastest. And the AngularJS rendering the slowest.

Note! AngularJS is amazing and super flexible and powerful because you don't really need to worry about how to re-render once the data changes. This is really useful when you do things like loading more data from a remote endpoint or doing some in-page filtering.

Enter ReactJS

The point of AJAX or Not was not to compare Javascript frameworks but I had some time and I thought I'd write an equivalent version of the AngularJS one with ReactJS (version 0.13.3).

Anyway, here's the code and it's using the GitHub fetch polyfill to do the AJAX query. The AngularJS code is here and here and as you can see it's using track by on the ng-repeat.

To measure the difference I ran a comparison in WebPageTest which I encourage you open and study for a bit. You can watch the video and download the video here.

Also, note that the Django rendered version loads jQuery. That's because the functionality dictates that clicking on a link should show a confirmation box before going to the link. I know, it's silly but it's very realistic that every page needs some Javascript functionality.

Executive summary...

• Django server-side takes 0.8 seconds, ReactJS version takes 2.0 seconds and the AngularJS version takes 2.9 seconds.
• The ReactJS version is the fastest to display something. It displays the header and the image first. Only by 0.2 seconds before the Django server-side version.
• The AngularJS version causes a lot more CPU utilization. This might really matter when you're on a low-end smartphone.
• The ReactJS causes twice as much CPU utilization than the server-side version. The AngularJS causes twice as much CPU utilization than the ReactJS version.
• AngularJS is slightly larger than ReactJS + fetch but I don't think this has a huge effect on the total load time.

Some other thoughts...

• The ReactJS code is all in one place more or less. That's neat! But it's pretty darn big in terms of number of lines. AngularJS code is split half in the Javascript code and half in the HTML.
• It's clear, if you want a fast loading page, avoid Javascript as much as you possibly can.
• This experiment is very optimized in how it gets the data to be displayed. In fact, the server-side rendering time is close to 0 seconds because the whole HTML blob is stored in memcached. A more realistic thing is that extracting the data would take a lot longer if the query isn't so easy to cache. That would be a huge disadvantage for the fully server-side rendered version since if the data query takes a long time you'll sit and stare at a white screen longer. Doing the AJAX approach would definitely be a nicer experience.
• The difference isn't that big. Both fancy Javascript frameworks have amazing features that leave jQuery in the dust but if you want your page to load crazy-fast, do as much server-side as you possibly can.

Premailer is a Python library for turning a HTML + CSS into HTML with all the CSS embedded as inline style attributes. This is sadly very necessary to ensure that your fancy HTML emails look spiffy across all email clients and email webapps.

So, last week I put together a little site to test the library via a browser: Premailer.io

It's just a simple webapp with a form where you can enter HTML in three different ways; textarea, by URL and by file upload.

You can also override all the possible advanced options that premailer supports.

What's kinda cool is that you can get a preview of how the HTML document will look like in an iframe that is dynamically loaded with the result from the conversion.

The webapp is of course open source and available on github.com/peterbe/premailer.io. The front-end is an AngularJS app and the build system is Lineman.js. The server is a Falcon server running on uWSGI via Nginx.

There's very little fancy here. There's no limitations or protections. I just hope it becomes handy for people to test premailer out.

The inspiration came from MailChimp's CSS Inliner Tool which is cute but very basic and doesn't allow you the same kinds of input.

If anybody with some AngularJS or highlight.js chops has time I'd love to help fix why the HTML is not syntax highlighted.

Something tells me there are already solutions like this out there that are written by much smarter people who have tests and package.json etc. Perhaps my Friday-brain failed at googling them up.

So, the issue I'm having is an angular app that uses a ui-router to switch between controllers.

In almost every controller it looks something like this:

app.controller('Ctrl', function($scope, $http) {
  /* The form that needs this looks something like this:
      <input name="first_name" ng-model="stuff.first_name">
   */
  $scope.stuff = {};
  $http.get('/stuff/')
  .success(function(response) {
    $scope.stuff = response.stuff;
  })
  .error(function() {
    console.error.apply(console, arguments);
  });
})

(note; ideally you push this stuff into a service, but doing it here in the controller illustrates what matters in this point)

So far so good. But so far so slow.

Every time the controller is activated, the AJAX GET is fired and it might be slow because of network latency.
And I might switch to this controller repeatedly within one request/response session of loading the app.

So I wrote this:

app.service('localProxy',
    ['$q', '$http', '$timeout',
    function($q, $http, $timeout) {
        var service = {};
        var memory = {};

        service.get = function(url, store, once) {
            var deferred = $q.defer();
            var already = memory[url] || null;
            if (already !== null) {
                $timeout(function() {
                    if (once) {
                        deferred.resolve(already);
                    } else {
                        deferred.notify(already);
                    }
                });
            } else if (store) {
                already = sessionStorage.getItem(url);
                if (already !== null) {
                    already = JSON.parse(already);
                    $timeout(function() {
                        if (once) {
                            deferred.resolve(already);
                        } else {
                            deferred.notify(already);
                        }
                    });
                }
            }

            $http.get(url)
            .success(function(r) {
                memory[url] = r;
                deferred.resolve(r);
                if (store) {
                    sessionStorage.setItem(url, JSON.stringify(r));
                }
            })
            .error(function() {
                deferred.reject(arguments);
            });
            return deferred.promise;
        };

        service.remember = function(url, data, store) {
            memory[url] = data;
            if (store) {
                sessionStorage.setItem(url, JSON.stringify(data));
            }
        };

        return service;
    }]
)

And the way you use it is that it basically returns twice. First from the "cache", then from the network request response.

So, after you've used it at least once, when you request data from it, you first get the cached stuff (from memory or from the browser's sessionStorage) then a little bit later you get the latest and greatest response from the server. For example:

app.controller('Ctrl', function($scope, $http, localProxy) {
  $scope.stuff = {};
  localProxy('/stuff/')
  .then(function(response) {
    // network response
    $scope.stuff = response.stuff;
  }, function() {
    // reject/error
    console.error.apply(console, arguments);
  }, function(response) {
    // update
    $scope.stuff = response.stuff;
  });
})

Note how it sets $scope.stuff = response.stuff twice. That means that the page can load first with the cached data and shortly after the latest and greatest from the server.
You get to look at something whilst waiting for the server but you don't have to worry too much about cache invalidation.

Sure, there is a risk. If your server response is multiple seconds slow, your user might for example, start typing something into a form (once it's loaded from cache) and when the network request finally resolves, what xhe typed in is overwritten or conflicting.

The solution to that problem is that you perhaps put the form in a read-only mode until the network request resolves. At least you get something to look at sooner rather than later.

The default implementation above doesn't store things in sessionStorage. It just stores it in memory as you're flipping between controllers. Alternatively, you might want to use a more persistent approach so then you instead use:

controller( // same as above
  localProxy('/stuff/', true)
  // same as above
)

Sometimes there's data that is very unlikely to change. Perhaps you just need the payload for a big drop-down widget or something. In that case, it's fine if it exists in the cache and you don't need a server response. Then set the third parameter to true, like this:

controller( // same as above
  localProxy('/stuff/', true, true)
  // same as above
)

This way, it won't fire twice. Just once.

Another interesting expansion on this is, if you change the data after it comes back. A good example is if you request data to fill in a form that user updates. After the user has changed some of it, you might want to pre-emptivly cache that too. Here's an example:

app.controller('Ctrl', function($scope, $http, localProxy) {
  $scope.stuff = {};
  var url = '/stuff/';
  localProxy(url)
  .then(function(response) {
    // network response
    $scope.stuff = response.stuff;
  }, function() {
    // reject/error
    console.error.apply(console, arguments);
  }, function(response) {
    // update
    $scope.stuff = response.stuff;
  });

  $scope.save = function() {
      // update the cache
      localProxy.remember(url, $scope.stuff); 
      $http.post(url, $scope.stuff);
  };
})

What do you think? Is it useful? Is it "bonkers"?

I can think of one possible beautification, but I'm not entirely sure how to accomplish it.
Thing is, I like the API of $http.get that it returns a promise with a function called success, error and finally. The ideal API would look something like this:

app.controller('Ctrl', function($scope, $http) {
  $scope.stuff = {};
  // angular's $http service expanded
  $http.getLocalProxy('/stuff/')
  .success(function(cached, response) {
    /* Imagine something like:
        <p class="warning" ng-if="from_cache">Results you see come from caching</p>
     */
    $scope.from_cache = cached;
    $scope.stuff = response.stuff;
  })
  .error(function() {
    console.error.apply(console, arguments);
  });
})

That API looks and feels just like the regular $http.get function but with an additional first argument to the success promise callback.

From the It-Depends-on-What-You're-Building department.

As a web developer you have a job:

1. Display a certain amount of database data on the screen
2. Do it as fast as possible

The first point is these days easily taken care of with the likes of Django or Rails which makes it über easy to write queries that you then use in templates to generate the HTML and voila you have a web page.

The second point is taken care of with a myriad of techniques. It's almost a paradox. The fastest way to render something on the screen is to generate everything on the server and send it wholesome. It means the browser can very quickly (and boosted by GPU) render something on the screen. But if you have a lot of data that needs to be displayed it's often better to send just a little bit of HTML and then let some Javascript kick in and take care of extracting the rest of the information using AJAX.

Here I have prepared three different versions of ways to display a bunch of information on the screen:

https://www.peterbe.com/ajaxornot/

What you should note and take away from this little experimental playground:

1. All server-side work is done in Django but it's served straight out of memcache so it should be fast server-side.

2. The content is NOT important. It's just a list of blog posts and their categories and keywords.

3. To make it somewhat realistic, each version needs to 1) display a JPG and 2) have a Javascript onclick event that throws a confirm() dialog box.

4. The AngularJS version loads significantly slower but it's not because AngularJS is slow, but because it's able to do so much more later. Loading a Javascript framework is like an investment. Big cost upfront and small cost later when you need more magic to happen without having a complete server refresh.

5. View 1, 2 and 3 are all three imperfect versions but they illustrate the three major groups of solving the problem stated at the top of this blog post. The other views are attempts of optimizations.

6. Clearly the "visually fastest" version is the optimization version 5 which is a fork of version 2 which loads, on the server-side, everything that is above the fold and then take care of the content below the fold with AJAX.
   See this visual comparison

7. Optimization version 4 was a silly optimization. It depends on the fact that JSON is more "compact" than HTML. When you Gzip the content, the difference in size doesn't matter anymore. However, it's an interesting technique because it means you can do all business logic rendering stuff in one language without having to depend on AJAX.

8. Open the various versions in your browser and try to "feel" how pages the load. Ask your inner gutteral heart which version you prefer; do you prefer a completely blank screen and a browser loading spinner or do you prefer to see some skeleton structure first whilst waiting for the bulk content comes in?

9. See this as a basis of thoughts and demonstration. Remember the very first sentence in this blog post.

You might have heard that AngularJS 1.3 has "one-time bindings" which is that you can print the value of a scope variable with {{ ::somevar }} and that this is really good for performance because it means that once rendered it doesn't add to the list of things that the angular app needs to keep worrying about. I.e. it's one less thing to watch.

But what's a good use case of this? This is a good example.

Because ng-if="true" will cause the DOM element to be re-created it will go back to the scope variable and re-evaluate it.

By writing this I'm taking a risk of looking like an idiot who has failed to read the docs. So please be gentle.

AngularJS uses a promise module called $q. It originates from this beast of a project.

You use it like this for example:

angular.module('myapp')
.controller('MainCtrl', function($scope, $q) {
  $scope.name = 'Hello ';
  var wait = function() {
    var deferred = $q.defer();
    setTimeout(function() {
      // Reject 3 out of 10 times to simulate 
      // some business logic.
      if (Math.random() > 0.7) deferred.reject('hell');
      else deferred.resolve('world');
    }, 1000);
    return deferred.promise;
  };

  wait()
  .then(function(rest) {
    $scope.name += rest;
  })
  .catch(function(fallback) {
    $scope.name += fallback.toUpperCase() + '!!';
  });
});

Basically you construct a deferred object and return its promise. Then you can expect the .then and .catch to be called back if all goes well (or not).

There are other ways you can use it too but let's stick to the basics to drive home this point to come.

Then there's the $http module. It's where you do all your AJAX stuff and it's really powerful. However, it uses an abstraction of $q and because it is an abstraction it renames what it calls back. Instead of .then and .catch it's .success and .error and the arguments you get are different. Both expose a catch-all function called .finally. You can, if you want to, bypass this abstraction and do what the abstraction does yourself. So instead of:

$http.get('https://api.github.com/users/peterbe/gists')
.success(function(data) {
  $scope.gists = data;
})
.error(function(data, status) {
  console.error('Repos error', status, data);
})
.finally(function() {
  console.log("finally finished repos");
});

...you can do this yourself...:

$http.get('https://api.github.com/users/peterbe/gists')
.then(function(response) {
  $scope.gists = response.data;
})
.catch(function(response) {
  console.error('Gists error', response.status, response.data);
})
.finally(function() {
  console.log("finally finished gists");
});

It's like it's built specifically for doing HTTP stuff. The $q modules doesn't know that the response body, the HTTP status code and the HTTP headers are important.

However, there's a big caveat. You might not always know you're doing AJAX stuff. You might be using a service from somewhere and you don't care how it gets its data. You just want it to deliver some data. For example, suppose you have an AJAX request cached so that only the first time it needs to do an HTTP GET but all consecutive times you can use the stuff already in memory. E.g. Something like this:

angular.module('myapp')
.controller('MainCtrl', function($scope, $q, $http, $timeout) {

  $scope.name = 'Hello ';
  var getName = function() {
    var name = null;
    var deferred = $q.defer();
    if (name !== null) deferred.resolve(name);
    $http.get('https://api.github.com/users/peterbe')
    .success(function(data) {
      deferred.resolve(data.name);
    }).error(deferred.reject);
    return deferred.promise;
  };

  // Even though we're calling this 3 different times
  // you'll notice it only starts one AJAX request.
  $timeout(function() {
    getName().then(function(name) {
      $scope.name = "Hello " + name;
    });    
  }, 1000);

  $timeout(function() {
    getName().then(function(name) {
      $scope.name = "Hello " + name;
    });    
  }, 2000);

  $timeout(function() {
    getName().then(function(name) {
      $scope.name = "Hello " + name;
    });    
  }, 3000);
});

And with all the other promise frameworks laying around like jQuery's you will sooner or later forget if it's success() or then() or done() and your goldfish memory (like mine) will cause confusion and bugs.

So is there a way to make $http.<somemethod> return a $q like promise but with the benefit of the abstractions that the $http layer adds?

Here's one such possible solution maybe:

var app = angular.module('myapp');

app.factory('httpq', function($http, $q) {
  return {
    get: function() {
      var deferred = $q.defer();
      $http.get.apply(null, arguments)
      .success(deferred.resolve)
      .error(deferred.resolve);
      return deferred.promise;
    }
  }
});

app.controller('MainCtrl', function($scope, httpq) {

  httpq.get('https://api.github.com/users/peterbe/gists')
  .then(function(data) {
    $scope.gists = data;
  })
  .catch(function(data, status) {
    console.error('Gists error', response.status, response.data);
  })
  .finally(function() {
    console.log("finally finished gists");
  });
});

That way you get the benefit of a one same way for all things that get you data some way or another and you get the nice AJAXy signatures you like.

This is just a prototype and clearly it's not generic to work with any of the shortcut functions in $http like .post(), .put() etc. That can maybe be solved with a Proxy object or some other hack I haven't had time to think of yet.

So, what do you think? Am I splitting hairs or is this something attractive?

A common thing in many (AngularJS) apps is to have an ng-model input whose content is used to as a filter on an ng-repeat somewhere within the page. Something like this:

<input ng-model="search">
<div ng-repeat="item in items | filter:search">...

Well, what if you want the search you make to automatically become part of the URL so that if you bookmark the search or copy the URL to someone else, the search is still there? It would be really practical. Granted, it's not always that you want this but that's something you can decide.

AngularJS 1.2 (I think) introduced the ability to set reloadOnSearch: false on a route provider and that means that you can do things like $location.hash('something') without it triggering the route provider to re-map the URL and re-start the revelant controller.

So here's a good example of (ab)using that to do a search filter which automatically updates the URL.

Check out the demo: https://www.peterbe.com/permasearch/index.html

This works in HTML5 mode too if you're wondering.

Suppose you use many more things in your filter function other than just a free text ng-modal. Like this:

<input type="text" ng-model="filters.search">
<select ng-model="filters.year">
<option value="">All</option>
<option value="2014">2014</option>
<option value="2013">2013</option>
</select>

You might have some checkboxes and stuff too. All you need to do then is to encode that information in the hash. Something like this might be a good start:

$scope.filters = {};
$scope.$watchCollection('filters', function(value) {
    $location.hash($.param(value)); // a jQuery function
});

And something like this to "unparse" the params.

Because this took me quite a while to figure out, I thought I'd share in case somebody else is falling into the same pit of confusion.

When you write an attribute directive in angularjs you might want to have it fed by an attribute value.
For example, something like this:

<div my-attribute="somevalue"></div>

How then do you create a new scope that takes that in? It's not obvious. Any here's how you do it:

app.directive('myAttribute', function() {
    return {
        restrict: 'A',
        scope: {
            myAttribute: '='
        },
        template: '<div style="font-weight:bold">{{ myAttribute | number:2 }}</div>'
    };
});

The trick to notice is that the "self attribute" because the name of the attribute in camel case.

Thanks @mythmon for helping me figure this out.

angular-classy, by @DaveJ, is an interesting AngularJS module that you use to get some class structure into your controller. You can check out his page and the documentation there for some basic examples of that it does.

This appeals to me as a Python developer because now my angular code looks more like a Python class. I also like that there's an init function now (similar to python's __init__ I guess) and I also like that you can distinguish between "scope functions" and "local functions". To explain that, consider this:

  // somewhere in a controller 
  ...


  $scope.addSomething = function() {  // used in your template
    if ($scope.some_precondition) {
      reallyAddSomething($scope.firt_name, $scope.last_name);
    }
  };

  function reallyAddSomething(first_name, last_name) {
    // can still use $scope in here
  }

And compare this with angular-classy:

  // somewhere in a controller 
  ...


  addSomething: function() {  // used in your template
    if (this.$scope.some_precondition) {
      this._reallyAddSomething(this.$scope.first_name, this.$scope.last_name);
    }
  },

  _reallyAddSomething = function(first_name, last_name) {
    // can still use this.$scope in here
  },

Basically, the _ prefix makes the function available on this but not attached to the scope. And I think that just makes sense!

So my guttural feeling is all positive about angular-classy. But there is still one big caveat. The mythical "this" in Javascript. It's great but it's kinda clunky too because it rebinds in every sub-scope. The solution to that is to bind things. For example, for a success promise it now has to look like this:

this.$http.get('/some/url')
.success(function(response) {
  this.somethingElseInTheModule(response.something);
}.bind(this));

Anyway, let's compare the before and after of a real project.

Before

controllers.js

After

controllers.js

What do you think? Does it look better? Full diff here

I think I like it. But I need to let it "sink in" a bit first. I think the code looks neater with angular-classy but it's now a new dependency and it means that people who know angular but not familiar with angular-classy would get confused when they are confronted with this code.

UPDATE

I merged the branch. So now this project is classy.