If you’re wondering why I’ve been quiet the past few weeks it’s because I’ve been devoting most of my free time to finishing off a new benchmark I’m releasing today called GUIMark. GUIMark is kinda like an Acid3 test on speed that’s geared towards RIA technologies. The goal was to figure out how to implement a reference design in different runtimes and then benchmark how smoothly that design could be animated. So far I have implementations in DHTML, Flex, Java, Silverlight 1 and Silverlight 2. All the results and and implementation details can be found under the GUIMark page.

GUIMark shares alot in common with another RIA benchmark Bubblemark. I’ve written a bit about Bubblemark and why I think an alternative is necessary, but I do believe Bubblemark and GUIMark can coexist while serving 2 different purposes. Alexey Gavrilov stated it best in that he sees Bubblemark as a sortof ‘Hello World’ launchpad into comparing different environments and I agree with him. Bubblemark is a *very* accessible test suite and its easy for any kind of developer to jump in and play around with performance techniques. GUIMark takes a different approach by trying to benchmark the types of UI elements common in our Web 2.0 world. This includes things like vector redraws, alpha transparencies, text reflow, bitmap motion, and 9 scale slicing rules. From there I just fill up the render pipeline until it becomes so over-saturated that it becomes easy to visually distinguish which rendering engines are more efficient then others. As a result, the benchmark is more complicated on a visual level and requires a bit more time then Bubblemark to understand the implementation rules. Lastly with GUIMark I’ve tried to get into some of the lower level details behind how rendering engines work and how that’s affected the creation of this project.

I’m hoping that developers and designers will be able to use this test suite to identify any pros or cons to choosing a particular environment when visual transitions are a key element of the experience. I’m also hoping these benchmarks provide a spotlight for the community that we can turn toward the runtime engineers inside Sun or Adobe or Mozilla to demand better performance.

Go to GUIMark home page