Tag Archives: javacript

javascript, tech

StackOverflow still delivers, fixes my Rollup.js problem

I hear plenty of complaints about StackOverflow, the developer Q&A site. Top of the list is unfriendliness and/or arguing about whether a question is well put rather than, well, answering the question.

For example, this Reddit post yesterday:

“It’s been three years since a question I posted to SO wasn’t closed within the first ten minutes of posting it and downvoted for good measure (that’ll teach me to use the site like it’s intended!).”

No doubt the complaints have some validity. StackOverflow is a kind of social media as well as a technology site and all social media sites have their problems.

Nevertheless, it remains a wonderful resource.

I am using the AWS Chime SDK for JavaScript in a project. I am using ASP.NET, it is not an SPA (Single Page Application), and it is not using React. The SDK though is primarily designed to be used with Node.js and a bundler like Webpack, fitting I guess with the majority of web applications being built today. The solution AWS provides for developers like myself is presented as a demo called singlejs.  This uses rollup.js to bundle the Chime SDK for JavaScript into a single file that can be used in any plain ordinary web page. A couple of weeks ago, someone got around to updating the demo to use version 3.x of the SDK.

I guess the committer checked that the demo worked and generated a JavaScript file, but did not actually check that it was usable. The way it is meant to work:

In a browser environment, window.ChimeSDK will be available. You can access Chime SDK components by component name. For example, you can create a meeting session and configure the meeting session using window.ChimeSDK.

Unfortunately the newly generated amazon-chime-sdk.min.js did not create this global variable, even though it is specified at the name property in rollup.config.js. I puzzled over this problem and tried to fix it in various ways, using different versions of rollup and the plugins it uses. I noted the problem in a GitHub issue on the relevant AWS repository but no response yet. Since it made it impossible for me to upgrade my project to the version 3.x of the SDK it was a significant problem.

I posted a question on StackOverflow. It did not attract many views, and at the time of writing it has only been viewed 31 times. I was not optimistic.

As so often with these kinds of problems, the fix is super simple. The source file in the singlejs demo, the one which Rollup bundles, has just one line of JavaScript:

export * from ‘amazon-chime-sdk-js’;

Someone popped up, 2 days after my post, and commented:

Update the src/index.js file with the following code and then rebuild the code with npm run bundle. Rollup recommends a default export if we have only single export.

export * as default from ‘amazon-chime-sdk-js’;

Indeed, that fixes it. So thank you to Vishnu S Krish, who for no reward has posted a solution that works, ahead of those busy AWS developers working on the project who have so far ignored it.

Thank you too to StackOverflow. It is imperfect; but it is not full of spam, it is a pleasant site to use and not afflicted by intrusive ads and popups, and it has a ton of good solutions.

professional, software development, tech

Web page memory usage: how much is too much?

I have a web application that loads names into a picklist and the question came up: how many names would be too much for the web page to handle? What about 5,000 names, for example?

Modern web browsers have a memory snapshot built in. Just press F12 and there it is. So I fired up my application with over 5,000 names loaded into an array and displayed in a scrolling div. 2.5 MB.

Then I visited Facebook. Logged in, the page reported over 78 MB.

image

Google’s clean-looking home page? Not logged in, 11.2 MB.

image

Twitter? Logged in, 83 MB.

image

This was enough for me to stop worrying about the memory impact of 5,000 names in my web application. With our casual acceptance of multi-MB web pages it is easy to forget that the complete works of Shakespeare in plain text is 5.5 MB and compresses to less than half of that.

Just because you can do something, does not mean you should. Smaller is better and faster, and software bloat of various kinds is responsible for many performance issues.

There are trade-offs though both in time and in performance. Maybe it is better to load just a few names, and retrieve more from the server when needed. It is easy to test such things. Nevertheless, I found it useful to get some perspective on the memory usage of modern web sites.