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Everest: A lightweight REST API client written in JavaFX

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Re: Everest: A lightweight REST API client written in JavaFX

#51

Post by mrighele »

chii wrote: post #47
mrighele wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people people were complaining about it 10 years ago. In those times I remember that you could recognize a Java desktop application because you could count the seconds that it would take for a menu to open after a click. While the current batch of Electron apps use lot of memory/cpu/battery, they usually fare _much_ better in interactivity, which is what often drives away a user.

> count the seconds that it would take for a menu to open after a click if that's really the case, then it was the application writer's fault, as java can be made just as responsive, if not more so, than electron. The GC can be tuned far better tha javascript!

I agree that a Java desktop application can be responsive, in fact I use a couple of them from time to time that behave quite well. Back in the day though my experience was that most of the Java software had terrible performance. In that case, I think it's correct to blame the platform for making hard to have a smooth experience "by default". (In the same way, for example, that we can blame C for not making it easy to write safe program, even if a programmer should be able to write them properly)

> The GC can be tuned far better tha javascript!

On this I agree completely! (altough my experience with that is mostly on the server side)

Re: Everest: A lightweight REST API client written in JavaFX

#52

Post by FlyingSnake »

rohitawate wrote: post #40
FlyingSnake wrote: post #11

Nice work! I was kinda expecting someone to showcase JavaFx/TornadoFx, after the daily parade of electron/JS based apps. > it is significantly lighter on resources and more responsive than the Electron-based options I tend to agree that this is lightweight than Electron etc, but are there any benchmarks to verify the actual numbers? One the side note, it's funny so see Java being touted as a `lightweight` alternative…

Yes it is lighter than the Electron-based options. Definitely a lot more than Postman which always consumes north of half a gig. Everest hovers around 250-300MB which I know is still a lot and I'm currently in the process of optimizing the internals. And another yes, Java is not the lightest thing around. But man its much better than Electron.

> Everest hovers around 250-300MB

Maybe I'm a spoilt C++ programmer, but 250-300 MB is still bit higher for my tastes. For me the golden standard of cross-platform desktop app is Sublime Text which usually hovers around 100-150 MB for me.

However I'm sure the memory usage, and performance can be drastically improved given the fact that JVM is one of the most heavily optimised pieces of software in recent times.

Edit: I just tried it, and it doesn't work for some of the methods for httpbin. Would be great if you could test the app against https://httpbin.org

Re: Everest: A lightweight REST API client written in JavaFX

#53

Post by rohitawate »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #52
rohitawate wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is lighter than the Electron-based options. Definitely a lot more than Postman which always consumes north of half a gig. Everest hovers around 250-300MB which I know is still a lot and I'm currently in the process of optimizing the internals. And another yes, Java is not the lightest thing around. But man its much better than Electron.

> Everest hovers around 250-300MB Maybe I'm a spoilt C++ programmer, but 250-300 MB is still bit higher for my tastes. For me the golden standard of cross-platform desktop app is Sublime Text which usually hovers around 100-150 MB for me. However I'm sure the memory usage, and performance can be drastically improved given the fact that JVM is one of the most heavily optimised pieces of software in recent times. Edit:…

I understand that 250-300MB is still a bit heavy, I'm not too happy with it either, but I've come to realize that even a Hello World JavaFX application with just a button on screen eats 70MB. I'm trying my level best to keep this at 200MB but I can't make any promises.

I sometimes wish I'd done this with C++, but it would be very tedious. I was quite proficient in JavaFX so I reckoned it will be the best tool for the job.

About httpbin: Could you please elaborate on that? Which method failed?

Re: Everest: A lightweight REST API client written in JavaFX

#54

Post by rohitawate »

saberworks wrote: post #16

It's nice. I tried it out on a mac. The experience leaves something to be desired. The startup time is excessive. It doesn't feel lightweight. When scrolling through a response body the scrolling feels completely different than on every other app on my mac. This must have something to do with java? It seems every "click" of the scroll wheel scrolls by a little more than half a line. Every other app scrolls ~3 lines p…

Hi! The dev here. Thanks for trying out Everest.

The JVM does have a slightly higher warm-up time than something like Node.js.

The slow scrolling is a JavaFX thing and bothers me too. I'll definitely polish that up, if possible.

I don't have a Mac at hand so I didn't do any Mac-specific stuff in Everest. I'll add the usual Mac ones in the coming weeks.

Re: Everest: A lightweight REST API client written in JavaFX

#55

Post by rohitawate »

Hi! I'm Rohit, the dev behind Everest.

First of all, I want to thank all of you for trying out Everest and providing such great feedback. The project really blew in popularity since yesterday. I was not expecting a response anything close to this (Everest is #2 on GitHub's Trending Java repositories).

I'm really happy that most of the responses have been positive with some constructive complaints. I'll make sure they're addressed in the coming alpha builds.

Regarding performance: Yes, JavaFX is not the lightest thing on the block but its much much lighter than Electron-based options. I know the memory usage for Alpha v1 is not too great (not bad either) and it will improve as we go ahead. I haven't made any JVM/GC tweaks yet. I'm currently working to optimize the internals and that has improved performance quite a bit.

I have my finals coming up in a week so the development is gonna be stalled for a while. But its gonna be fun. We'll build a kickass application together.

Thanks, again!

PS: HN keeps throttling my account since I'm a newbie around here so if you want to reach out to me, I recommend you do so via Twitter or email, both of which are available in Everest's README.

Re: Everest: A lightweight REST API client written in JavaFX

#56

Post by ionised »

saberworks wrote: post #16

It's nice. I tried it out on a mac. The experience leaves something to be desired. The startup time is excessive. It doesn't feel lightweight. When scrolling through a response body the scrolling feels completely different than on every other app on my mac. This must have something to do with java? It seems every "click" of the scroll wheel scrolls by a little more than half a line. Every other app scrolls ~3 lines p…

Start up time was like a second for me.

Re: Everest: A lightweight REST API client written in JavaFX

#57

Post by grzm »

rohitawate wrote: post #55

Hi! I'm Rohit, the dev behind Everest. First of all, I want to thank all of you for trying out Everest and providing such great feedback. The project really blew in popularity since yesterday. I was not expecting a response anything close to this (Everest is #2 on GitHub's Trending Java repositories). I'm really happy that most of the responses have been positive with some constructive complaints. I'll make sure they…

> ”HN keeps throttling my account since I'm a newbie around here”

You can reach out to the mods via the Contact link in the footer. They can remove the new-account throttling on a case-by-case basis.

Re: Everest: A lightweight REST API client written in JavaFX

#58

Post by FlyingSnake »

rohitawate wrote: post #53
FlyingSnake wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everest hovers around 250-300MB Maybe I'm a spoilt C++ programmer, but 250-300 MB is still bit higher for my tastes. For me the golden standard of cross-platform desktop app is Sublime Text which usually hovers around 100-150 MB for me. However I'm sure the memory usage, and performance can be drastically improved given the fact that JVM is one of the most heavily optimised pieces of software in recent times. Edit:…

I understand that 250-300MB is still a bit heavy, I'm not too happy with it either, but I've come to realize that even a Hello World JavaFX application with just a button on screen eats 70MB. I'm trying my level best to keep this at 200MB but I can't make any promises. I sometimes wish I'd done this with C++, but it would be very tedious. I was quite proficient in JavaFX so I reckoned it will be the best tool for the…

Don't get me wrong, 250-300 MB is perfectly fine. As long as it doesn't grow exponentially and take over the system like Electron apps do, people would love to use this. I think you've got a solid product at hand and you should try to grow this commercially.

I tried `https://httpbin.org/deflate`, `https://httpbin.org/status/418`, and `https://httpbin.org/brotli`, and they all failed on me. It would be cool if you could use httpbin as a test suite.

Re: Everest: A lightweight REST API client written in JavaFX

#59

Post by FredrikMeyer »

Very short feedback: it looks very nice (startup time was fast on my Mac). However, some of the usual Mac hotkeys in text fields didn't work. In (for example) the Chrome URL field I can press ctrl+a to go to the beginning of the URL (in this case I forgot to write http://). Didn't work.
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