Project Progress Report

Just to keep the blog active I’ll give a brief progress report.  Basically I have completed the main body or the report document using nearly all of the 15000 word allowance.  I have proofread the document twice now so it is in fairly good order.  There are several appendices that must now be written including a glossary and the section on future research projects.  While the report has a reasonable amount of references I should also go through and see it I can provide support for some of the statements I have made.

The next obvious focus for the project is designing the final presentation.  Thought needs to be given as to what will be included and what will be excluded.  Once the presentation is complete it will be important to practice and ensure that it is the correct length.  Thought too should be given to some of the questions that may be asked after its conclusion.

With regard to the report I will get a couple of other opinions.  Paul has already part read it for me and found it mostly ok.  My mum will read it for me too.  I have also made an appointment at the library to go over it with someone.

Project Progress Report

I know that there is probably no one reading this blog but I consider it worthwile putting on paper (or the internet as the case may be) exactly where I am in terms of project completion.

As things stand I have completed the testing phase of my project and should no longer need to use the lab. What little testing I do now will be only for the purposes of verification if certain observations are unclear.

As for my progress through the report I have completed the first draft. The draft is totally unproofread and contains much that needs improvement. I expect to spend the following two weeks proofing and improving this draft.

The final stage of the project will be preparing for the presentation. This will be considered and time alloted once the report is complete.

Tomcat is faster than GlassFish

A slight worry in the back of my mind was that close tie between JSP and the server platform it is run under. In order to gain further information I spent today installing and running tests against GlassFish to compare with Tomcat.

The findings of this exercise were very simple: Tomcat is faster. This is as I suspected all along since Tomcat is purely a JSP capable shell wheras GlassFish is a complete enterprise capable application server.

Another useful thing I found out today is that PHP no longer supports ISAPI. Since people seemed of mixed opinion as to whether FastCGI or ISAPI should be used this a useful bit of information. Whether it is better or not FastCGI is the only supported technology that will work at speed.

A case for denormalisation

For various reasons I carried out two sets of tests against to similar pages.  One page retrieves data from only one table in the database.  The other page retrieves data by bridging between several tables.  The results changed from around 2ms to 40ms leaving a huge difference to be accounted for merely in the DBMS creating the joins.

If time is available (and I think it is) it will be interesting to investigate whether this result can be improved by introducing a denormalised field in the database.  I suspect this to be rather easy but in reality would also require some complex logic to be executed on update (probably as a trigger).