Recently I took Google Chrome Canary 64-bits (R39) to the test. It appeared that Google’s own disclaimer:

Be forewarned: it's designed for developers and early adopters, 
and can sometimes break down completely.

Should be taken seriously. Both Canary and the stable version (R37) should be able to run side-by-side. Even though both R37 and R39 were working flawlessly for normal browsing, my Siebel dedicated client would no longer run against R37. Uninstalling both releases and installing R37 fresh resolved the issue.

First thing I did: run Google’s own Octane2 benchmark against both browsers a couple of times. I made sure there were no other CPU intensive tasks running.

Interestingly enough R39 is behind R37 overall.

Octane is a an open source initiative from Google. The dimensions against which Octane tests browsers are shown on the left-hand side. In the middle section contains the rough results for IE11, FF31, Chrome R37 and R39 are shown. On right-hand side performance factors are calculated.

R37 overall is a factor 1,1 faster than R39. On certain dimensions the differences are more than a little.

The red highlighted rows have in my personal view are important dimensions for Siebel OpenUI performance. The dimensions are pretty well explained here.

For example “Splay” and “SplayLatency” are relevant to the OpenUI framework. OpenUI depends on JQuery and executes fast amounts of script. So object creation, destruction and an efficient garbage collection process are key.

• Splay
  Data manipulation benchmark that deals with splay trees and exercises the automatic memory management subsystem. Main focus: Fast object creation, destruction.

• SplayLatency
  The Splay test stresses the Garbage Collection subsystem of a VM. SplayLatency instruments the existing Splay code with frequent measurement checkpoints. A long pause between checkpoints is an indication of high latency in the GC. This test measures the frequency of latency pauses, classifies them into buckets and penalizes frequent long pauses with a low score. Main focus: Garbage Collection latency.

Put it together in a visual representation…

What I’m personally particularly interested in is whether Octane2 could be a valid benchmark for Siebel OpenUI in particular. Octane2 is developed by Google, so will Chrome prevail by definition over other browsers? There are other benchmarks such as Sunspider (see previous post) and Dromaeo. The nice thing about Dromaeo is that it splits up in certain categories of tests focussed e.g. on CSS selection and JQuery (used quite a bit in OUI as we know). I did not used Dromaeo so far, on the list. Dromaeo tests are more elaborate and take more time to complete.

So let’s loop back to my previous post where I build a number of increasingly heavy Siebel OpenUI views. I ran a new set of timing tests using the described mechanism.

You will see two rows (collapsed and expanded). For now – just neglect this. Will spent a separate post on my challenges to improve complex views – rather than splitting the applets across different views ;-)

For example these test tell that Chrome R37 is on average 1,2x faster than R39. That compares to the Octane2 results. Especially if you relate it to Siebel OpenUI relevant test dimensions:

Also the Chrome vs FF (1,4x) compares pretty well to the timings measured in my OpenUI stress test views.

But to comparing to IE it would be a very bad indicator… Where the OpenUI performance factors are 3,4x for FF vs IE and 4,3x for Chrome vs IE – Octane would respectively indicate a factor 1,8x and 2,5x.

What is clear is that the performance breakdown on IE11 follows an exponential function, where as for FF and Chrome it’s a more linear curve. Which was made clear in the previous post already.

In a next post I will dive a bit deeper into Dromaeo as well to continue my quest to improve rendering large views in OpenUI.

As said, next to Octane 2 there is another extensive benchmarking framework: Dromaeo.

Took it to the test for the usual suspects.

The good thing of Dromaeo is that it has dedicated tests for jQuery, very useful :-)

And the results are…

It is clear again that IE11 overall is being surpassed by its rivals. Especially when looking at the relevant dimensions for Siebel Open UI (jQuery) Chrome is the overall winner. For jQuery DOM Query/selector operations Firefox and Chrome end ex-aequo. More general the jQuery framework is better tailored for Chrome. The more all-purpose DOM operations are best tailored for Firefox (these entail direct DOM operation without using any framework).

Painful to see how bad IE11 performs for generic DOM traversal.

Please invite Siebel customers to this free event being held by Oracle and BoxFusion:

Are you getting the most out of Siebel? At this event dedicated to Siebel Open UI, you’ll see experts from Oracle and Boxfusion demonstrating how you can take full advantage of Open UI and its latest features to enable multiple device support and promote increased usability and adoption throughout your organisation! No matter where you are on the Open UI pathway, from initial discovery through to designing modern, intuitive UI flows that accelerate your business processes, you will find experts who can answer your questions.

There’s a series of ongoing monthly webcasts for Siebel customers that launched last fall. Here’s the schedule of upcoming webcasts:

• September 11 – Deliver personalized campaigns to improve lead quality
• October 16 – Listen and engage across social channels to improve results
• November 13 – Adapt to changing business needs easily.

Also check out the Siebel CX YouTube channel 

Siebel IP2013 Patchset 11 got delayed a bit but has been released.

Patch numbers:

19533246 (8.1.1.11.11)
19533247 (8.2.2.4.11)

There are a couple of noticeable fixes in Patchset 11:

IN LIST APPLETS, AUTO SELECT FUNCTIONALITY DOES NOT WORK

18603044

AUTO SELECT DOES NOT APPEAR WHEN USERS FIRST TYPE INTO A DROP-DOWN LIST BOX

18677940

This feature bring back the static picklist functionality with the HI client. It was one issue I had to chase for one of my customers. My customer verified the functionality on a beta release of the fix and finally it got merged into patchset 11. The fix is all about auto-select / type-forward functionality to work consistent in a number of different scenarios. In previous releases it worked either partially or inconsistently. Having this feature will be a sigh of relief for many customers.

ENHANCES JAVASCRIPT PERFORMANCE FOR OPEN UI APPLICATIONS                   

19238525

This is one other fix to note. All the JScript files have been overhauled. Hard to belief but by changing most “for” loops into “while-do” loops (and there are plenty, plenty in the OUI framework) we realized an improvement of JScript processing of about 5-35% pretty much regardless the browser used. Especially in views with more and larger list applets, the rendering time has been reduced significantly. The 5-35% has been objectively measured on a customer customized application for a number of their key views.

Below the complete list with fixes:

This the the teaser…

This post actually can be considered a workaround. On the other hand it provides end-user functionality. As most of you will know IP13 comes with the configurable option for “Collapsible Applets“. Just adding two Applet User Properties does the work to make an applet to appear either expanded (default) or collapsed. Though this is very nice, collapsing the applet will only happen once most of the OpenUI code has completed execution. In that sense if you would collapse all your applets in any view, it would take almost the same amount of time to render the view.

Now, I wanted to figure out an option which would reduce rendering time by showing collapsed applets. Why? Because large views in Siebel Open UI tend to require linear more time to render (see my previous post). And we do have many existing customers which have build such legacy views in the past which would render just fine in High Interactivity, but are less acceptable in Open UI.

What I came up with is the option to use traditional toggle applets. For my noticeable expensive view from my previous post I created a whole bunch of “dummy” applets. Just empty shell form applet with no controls exposed. The nice behavior here is that rendering the dummy toggle applets obviously would come at considerable less execution time.

One “dummy” applet for any applet I want to expose. Why one for each? Because the hard-coded configuration of the “Toggle” attribute on the applet. But since it pertains here just a bare-essential applet that is not such a big deal.

So far so good. But traditional toggle applets require the clumsy use of a combobox to toggle between applets. Perfectly fine if you have a whole list of potential toggles. But in this case I want to present the user with a more user-friendly “double-click” to toggle from the dummy applet to the actual applet.

After inspecting (or say: reverse-engineering) a bit the OOTB code concepts, I found a way to actually invoke the Toggle method within a physical renderer.  It took some time to get this particular part of the solution to work ;-)

I put the code within tine BindEvents funcion of my custom “togglepr.js”. After reverse-engineering other OOTB code – I found that using the “OnControlEvent” method on the Presentation Model would be best suited. The nice thing here is that BindEvents will pass the PM context along, which you can access using the data.ctx object. The ctx object will get you the presentation model.

Next invoking the Toggle should be best-practice done using the constant defined by Siebel for this method “PHYEVENT_INVOKE_TOGGLE”. Finally we need to pass the sequence of the applet we would like to toggle to. In our case “1”.

I decided only to implement uni-directionally toggling (from dummy -> actual applet, but not back to the dummy applet). That keeps things easy.

Next I wanted to have clean and crisp dummy applets. So no “Toggle” combobox, no “Menu” and now Row Counter.

Removing the toggle combobox and the menu was easy.

Removing the row-counter caused more troubles. It appears the row-counter is inserted at a very late stage. After the ShowUI of my custom physical renderer completed execution.

Using setTimeout brought the solution. This function can be found on several location in the Open UI standard code, and is standard JScript function. You pass it two arguments, a function and a sleep time. Functionally, if you provide a sleep time of “0”, it will execute after all other JScript code has completed.

Because I also did not want the Toggle combobox on the actual applets, I needed to add some further logic using ClientPMUserProperties. I created two:

The “BareEssentials” property will remove the complete div for all applet content. The “HideToggle” property will remove the Toggle combobox.

Just for sake of the POC I added these two to the OOTB pmodel.js. This is obviously not a recommended practice for production. But it saved me time creating a custom presentation model extension.

The end result is that the initial view looks as such:

By double-clicking on any of the headers, the applet will toggle. Double-clicking on e.g. “ToggleCAC” will render the view as such. And this will execute very fast too, as it only partially refreshes the view instead of rendering the complete view.

You can grab the complete physical renderer here.

In addition to @lex’ recent post commenting on the way Oracle addresses “fears, uncertainties and doubts” spread by Oracle competition, Oracle implemented as well the going-forward strategy to extend premier support. Premier support has been extended until November 2017 (+1 year). Since Oracle adopted the Innovation Pack release approach for Siebel almost three years back, the premier support policy for Siebel, as part of Oracle Lifetime Support for applications are extended on the same pace.

What does not change are the “general” rules for eligibility for bug fixes to be considered as part of a patch set, for that please refer to “Siebel CRM Patching Policy (Doc ID 1313941.1)“ on MOS. I quoted “general” because (also) to these rules exceptions could apply under certain circumstances where there is a compelling business case.

Jeroen

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-09-18/larry-ellison-steps-down-as-oracles-ceo

Nice post by Karim working with Oracle’s partner Boxfusion.

Simple Siebel Usability Enhancements with Open UI

- Jeroen

How cool is that. See Shiv’s blog for more details. Below the teaser.

- Jeroen

Nice and quick tutorial for those new to the subject, posted on My Oracle Support. It discusses when you would create a custom presentation model and demonstrates it as as learning-by-example.

Siebel IP2013 Patchset 11 has been released

8.1.1.11[23030]_PATCHSET13 – Patch id : 19983158
8.2.2.4[23030]_PATCHSET13 – Patch id : 19983157

Details to be found here:

Siebel Patchset Installation Guides for Siebel CRM 8.1.1.11 / 8.2.2.4 IP2013 (Doc ID 1614310.1)

- Jeroen

In anticipation of the general availability of IP14 itself, the IP14 bookshelf has been published :-)

My Oracle Support published the IP14 revision for the “it-should-be-well-known-by-Siebel-folks”  Siebel Open UI Deployment Guide.

Among others the guide provides a reference to a catch-all article related with Internet Explorer performance issues with Open UI.

Internet Explorer 10 and 11 performance limitations that impact Open UI functionality for complex customized views (Doc ID 1944035.1)

Microsoft is being challenged by a number of Oracle (Siebel) customers to resolve the major performance bottlenecks. And… Microsoft apparently did pick up on this, and are working towards fixing the known performance limitations! No guarantees can be given, but an IE11 patch is to be expected in the coming months :-)

- Jeroen

Update Nov 19th: Product development confirmed that IP14 Patchset 1 will be highly recommended for production use.  But there is nothing withholding you to start and go through IRM - for which Patchset 1 isn’t a prerequisite!

Innovation Pack 2014 can be downloaded from eDelivery!

• 8.1.1.14 for Windows
• 8.1.1.14 for Linux
• 8.1.1.14 for Solaris
• 8.1.1.14 for AIX

- Jeroen

Oracle added as part of IP14 (8.1.1.14 / 8.2.2.14) a couple of useful features to the existing Incremental Repository Merge (IRM) process. Two enhancements which are strikingly interesting:

• Upgrade Conflict HTML Report
• Seed Data Upgrade Conflict HTML Report

The Hierarchical Conflict HTML Report basically is an improvement to the Hierarchical Conflict report introduced in IP13 (8.1.1.11 / 8.2.2.4). The previous reports is driven from Tools and allows for querying dependent objects for example. The HTML report more or less does the same, but searching through an HTML document can be more convenient than navigating the “traditional” report which works against tables.

Dependency Information is generated for Applications, Screens, Views, Business Components, Applets, Tables, Business Services, Business Objects and Workflow Processes.

The Hierarchical Conflict HTML Report is generated after the Tools merge process completes. It is generated once the srvrupgwiz continues. The report is called “MergeReport.html” and should be found under the “siebsrvr\log\upgrep_dev_xxx\” folder.

Below two screenshots. Soon a comprehensive set of “transfers of information” will be made available by Oracle. It will discuss among other these enhancements. There will be a set of functional and technical TOI sessions. I keep you posted.

- Jeroen

Related to a previous post on IRM improvements, IP14 provides also a new “Seed Data Comparison HTML Report”. The Seed Data Comparison report has been included in HTML format which provides details of modified and updated/created seed data records from previous releases.

This report can proof very valuable as finding the needle in the haystack where it concerns seed data can be a painstaking process.

The Seed Data Conflict report program will be executed once upgrade is complete which generates the HTML report comprising of summary of counts of all tables along with details of Violation in case if there is any.

The report is generated under “siebsrvr\log\upgphys_dev_xxx\output” folder if executed during upgphys or under “siebsrvr\log\verify_repository\output” folder.

Below two screenshots. Soon a comprehensive set of “transfers of information” will be made available by Oracle. It will discuss among other these enhancements. There will be a set of functional and technical TOI sessions. I keep you posted

- Jeroen

According to Wikipedia Responsive Web Design (RWD) is:

“…an approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience — easy reading and navigation with a minimum of re-sizing, panning, and scrolling — across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones)…”

Oracle’s main driver to make Siebel’s Open UI “responsive” most certainly has been to move to one single development and technology stack for desktop, tablet and other mobile use.

This strategy did require a complete re-factoring of the existing OpenUI themes which Oracle delivered in previous releases. The new (single) theme which comes along with IP14 is called “Aurora”.

Besides the fact that Aurora looks like a descent “flat” theme to start with, it also means that customers upgrading from Innovation Pack 13 or before, and deployed on OpenUI using the traditional themes have to go through a new cycle of change management for their end-users.

The pre-existing themes do no longer ship with Innovation Pack 2014

Well, it simply means all customers upgrading from Innovation Pack 2012 or 2013 will be affected :-( Re-factoring the existing themes and make them responsive was simply not realistic for Oracle.

The good thing is – Aurora really is a better theme base theme. Elegant, modern, easier to modify and responsive.

Aurora comes with these options:

1. Tab navigation
2. Tree navigation
3. Side bar navigation

The new “Side bar navigation” is ultimately meant for touch devices, though it would work just fine in a desktop scenario. But in a desktop scenario it would certainly work far less efficient. The Side bar navigation on a touch device obviously has the great benefit of using far less screen real-estate.

The traditional Tab navigation…

The Tree navigation…

The new Side bar navigation…

The first thing that has changed is the introduction of the new “CSS Framework”. In previous OUI releases it would be still a cumbersome to change an existing (or create a new!) mainly theme because of scattered CSS classes, which were not really fit for re-use. The CSS Framework addresses this by standardizing CSS class names, re-use class names and have single method for modifying certain values shared by multiple CSS classes. For that cause Oracle moved to LESS-based CSS. LESS essentially is a pre-processer for CSS (like it’s competing sister SASS). This post explains the bare essentials about LESS. In a future post I will explain how LESS works in conjunction with OpenUI.

Further the CSS Framework implements responsiveness by having breakpoints for different view ports. To facilitate a responsive layout, each screen is divided into 12 equal columns. Developers can then use predefined “fluid grid classes” to specify the percentage of its parent’s width each element would occupy.

The predefined view ports are defined as:

This leads to these predefined classes:

These “fluid classes” will be used in web templates. Below an example.

The examples defines that “div1″ and “div2″ will be stacked for “small” screens and split 25/75 for “medium” screens,  33/66 for “large” screens and 50/50 for “large” screens. Since “extra small” is undefined, it would assume the default for “extra small” screens. This default should be found somewhere… (apologies, at this time I cannot answer this question…).

Further many icons have been changed to vector graphics so that they nicely re-size and render appropriately on other devices. That means you will find in the aurora.css a lot of base64 encoded SVG icons. Personally I’m not sure about potential performance implications having a huge CSS which in turn has many SVG images stored. In terms of CSS processing, would it have measurable impact compared to displaying just static content images? If you have an idea, let me know! I did some Googling but did not find supporting evidence pro or con.

Last but not least, traditional desktop features such as multivalue groups also apply to other form-factors than traditional desktops, hence are available on mobile devices too.

More will follow…!

- Jeroen

Patchset 1 for IP14 (8.1.1.14 / 8.2.2.14) has been released on My Oracle Support per patch number 20063469! You can grab the release notes here: 8.1.1.14 23044 SIA PATCHSET1 sebl_aru.

- Jeroen

I was looking for an alternative diagram editor to Visio. I have been using Visio in the past but was looking for a better SaaS solution. I put my bet on draw.io, the alternative would be Lucidchart. It seems to have sufficient support for UML and plain ER diagrams. And it comes out of the box with Dropbox and Google Drive integration. Initial experiences are good. It responds appropriately. And I really like the Dropbox integration if offers! And no charges at all.