Well Browser

The Well Browser video demonstrates another application that was developed in a very short time (about a week), but it also demonstrates the value of developing software libraries which target a company's business logic. Companies very often put more value on buying off-the-shelf components over developing their own components. This may or may not be the best policy depending on the type of data involved.

In the video I illustrate this using the Well Browser versus using an Excel spread sheet to look at the same data set. The specific data being opened by Excel is 1/2 gigabyte of telemetry data exported from the original data set containing 3/4 gigabyte of an entire project.

Excel takes much longer to open the data and to save the changes. It also struggles to scroll through the data as efficiently as Well Browser. This is not to disparage Excel, which is an excellent application, but to point out that software developed in-house can out perform top notch third party applications and components because the in-house components have the benefit of targeting the company's business logic directly instead of trying to solve the problems generically.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this page, Well Browser was developed in about a week. The reason it took that long was because the off-the-shelf grid controls could not keep up with the scrolling and at that point I decided to write two grid controls--one for tables and another to target curve groups (groups of telemetry). In reality it is the same control with a property to customize the behavior for those two cases. VDM is highly optimized for telemetry data and the access to that data is different from traditional tabular data. It would have been far more convenient to accept the limitations of the off-the-shelf component, but the end user's experience would have been significantly degraded if that path was taken.