Performant Controls (hijacking Re: Developing controls based on Canvas?)

[Jonathan Giles]

I don't think there is any particular secret sauce going on in what I do 
compared with the general guidelines that have been spelled out numerous 
times. It's the same old, same old: don't create more nodes than you 
need, don't modify the scenegraph needlessly, don't update the 
scenegraph multiple times in a single pulse, change state as little as 
possible, use as few listeners as possible, etc. I wish I had something 
more groundbreaking for you, but that is about it :-)

With respect to TableView (and ListView, TreeView, and TreeTableView), 
they are all based on the same virtualisation code (VirtualFlow for 
those of you playing at home). We don't rubber stamp, we create separate 
cell instances for the visible area of the control, and reuse these 
exact same cells as the user scrolls. Therefore, if the visible area 
requires 20 cells, we may create ~22 cells, and as the user scrolls 
downwards we take the cells that disappear out the top of the view and 
place them at the bottom of the view, with their new content in place 
before it is shown on screen.

Because all cells come from a single cell factory, and all cells can be 
used in any location, it is up to the cell to respond to the item placed 
into it and draw itself appropriately. Therefore, we don't have 1000's 
of types of cells in a single control, we only have one type of cell 
that needs to handle all the visual approaches required in the app. 
Realistically, there aren't 1000's of styles in a single control, 
normally there are only one, or two at most. All this takes place in the 
Cell.updateItem(T, boolean) method, and so people overriding this method 
need to be smart and not do heavy lifting in there. The biggest mistake 
I see people doing in updateItem(...) is throw away their entire cell 
scenegraph and recreate the nodes and update the scenegraph. This is unwise.

If you have a ListView with 100 nodes, and they are all equally sized 
except for one (say the 50th), which is _significantly_ bigger, you will 
see the scrollbar jump in size and other weirdness happen when it is 
scrolled into view, precisely for the reason you state - we can't go off 
and measure every row as we'd be doing a lot of busy work. We only 
measure what is in the visual area, and we don't know where we are in 
the scroll range in terms of pixels but rather in terms of a 0.0 - 1.0 
range (which is translated back to pixels when needed). Up to this point 
I've known about this issue but I've not spent the cycles to resolve it 
- it is a relatively rare use case (although it still happens). Priority 
#1 for these virtualised controls is always speed.

If zooming were required on TableView, the implication (I presume) is 
that there would be that less cells that were visible at any one time, 
and so we would end up having less cells in the scenegraph. Other than 
that, things would work as above.

In a past life I did a lot of work in Java 2D. This worked really well 
for use cases like you suggest at the end of your email, namely zooming 
and direct mouse manipulation of nodes on screen. If I were to write 
something like you show in the screenshot, I would be tempted to take a 
Canvas-based route nowadays, but of course that decision would also be 
driven by the requirements and use cases, and it is possible a 
scenegraph-based approach with absolute node positioning would work just 
as well.

Hope that helps.

-- Jonathan

On 6/08/2013 12:38 p.m., Daniel Zwolenski wrote:
> Sneaking in here, as you've given an opening with "if implemented 
> wisely, there is very little that a scenegraph-based approach can't 
> do". The question I've been asking for a while is what does 
> "implemented wisely" look like in JFX.
>
> This has come up in the performance conversations, the game 
> conversations, the CAD conversations, and many other places. No one 
> seems to have an answer, but you're building extremely complex stuff 
> on a regular basis - what's your tips?
>
> When you say you only have "20 visible nodes" out of 1000's in general 
> are the other nodes:
> a) in the scenegraph and set to not visible
> b) in memory but not in the scenegraph - added/removed when scrolled 
> into view and out of view
> c) not in memory, created, added and then removed, destroyed when 
> scrolled into view and out of view
> d) something else?
>
> I know Table uses a rubber stamp approach, where it re-uses cell views 
> where possible, but let's say every row in my 100,000 row Table was 
> uniquely rendered using a different cell. What would happen under the 
> covers?
>
> How do you work out the scroll range as well? Each cell can be a 
> unique height right? How do you know the extents of the vertical 
> scrolling without instantiating and rendering everything? Is this what 
> you do? What if a cell is changing size (has a collapsable pane in it, 
> etc) - what happens to the vertical scroll range?
>
> Do any of the controls have zooming on them? Have you had to deal with 
> this and have you got a strategy for handling this with respect to 
> scroll bounds, working out which nodes are in view, scaling fonts, 
> etc? Could you hazard a guess at what you would do if you had to 
> implement zooming on a Table for example?
>
> Maybe the Table is lucky with its restrictive grid like layout but 
> imagine you had to build a visualisation of the same data but in a 
> diagram, maybe something like 
> http://www.novell.com/communities/files/img/groupwise_8_protocol_flow_diagram_v1.3.jpg 
> but with x100 nodes, with zooming and panning - could you outline a 
> general strategy?
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Jonathan Giles 
> <jonathan.giles at oracle.com <mailto:jonathan.giles at oracle.com>> wrote:
>
>     I think it would pay to take a step back and understand why you
>     think a 'traditional' scenegraph-based (or retained mode) control
>     is not sufficient for your needs?
>     Unfortunately you've not detailed your use case, so it is hard to
>     give any specific advice. Are you able to give any details about
>     what it is you're trying to build and why you think the normal
>     approach to building controls is not sufficient?
>
>     We've built some fairly complex controls using this approach, and
>     if implemented wisely, there is very little that a
>     scenegraph-based approach can't do. Specifically, do you think
>     your control will render all of the 'thousands of nodes' at once,
>     or will many of these nodes be off screen or otherwise not visible
>     at any one time? For things like the TableView we only render the
>     nodes that are visible. This means that regardless of whether
>     there are 100 or 1,000,000 rows of data, we only have visual nodes
>     for the 20 visible rows, for example. Keeping your scenegraph as
>     minimal as possible is always a very wise idea, if performance is
>     a concern.
>
>     As you note, the other problem is that you will run into issues if
>     you want to mix canvas rendering with the scenegraph-based
>     controls like Button. The best you're likely to achieve (having
>     not tried it personally) is to position the control on top of the
>     canvas, rather than attempting to render the control inside the
>     canvas (and having to then deal with event handling, etc). This
>     will likely prove to be finicky, and more cumbersome than simply
>     using an entirely canvas-based or entirely scenegraph-based approach.
>
>     -- Jonathan
>
>
>     On 5/08/2013 10:11 p.m., Felix Bembrick wrote:
>
>         I am investigating the feasibility of developing a JavaFX 8
>         control based
>         on Canvas.  I have chosen Canvas as the base class as this
>         control is of a
>         very dynamic nature and would not be easy to implement with a
>         retained mode
>         style ancestor (at least as far as I can tell).
>
>         So is this feasible?  While I can readily see how to render
>         the visual
>         aspects of the control, I am not sure how to best "embed"
>         other controls
>         within it should that become necessary (and almost certainly
>         will).
>
>         For example, how would I go about embedding a Button within my
>         control?  It
>         looks to me like I would need to create an actual Button node
>         somewhere
>         else in the scenegraph and then perhaps render it within my
>         control using
>         gc.drawImage() passing in a snapshot of the Button node.
>          That's OK but
>         then I have to somehow handle events and I am not sure how
>         best to do that.
>
>         Another issue I see is that there seems to be no way to apply
>         effects to
>         individual graphic elements within the Canvas as the
>         applyEffect() method
>         applies to the entire Canvas.
>
>         Finally, a significant obstacle is this issue:
>
>         https://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-23822
>
>         This issue relates to the lack of support for LCD font
>         smoothing within
>         Canvas.  This may not sound that serious but the difference
>         between LCD
>         font-smoothed text in other controls and the grey-scale text
>         in Canvas is
>         so distinct on my current machine that a control based on
>         Canvas would
>         really stick out like a sore thumb and appear significantly
>         less appealing
>         than a "standard" control.
>
>         So, am I wasting my time?
>         Are there any other issues I am likely to face?
>         Are there other ways to develop dynamic controls which may involve
>         thousands of nodes (such as lines, curves etc.)?
>
>         Thanks,
>
>         Felix
>
>
>