Serialization to the rescue

I wanted to post this ever since I had been through Bentley's articles. This happened when I was working on mobile devices and subject is about exploring alternate solutions for a given software problem, each with its own plus, minus points. The lesson I learned is that, there is always a scope and environment to the code that you write and making the right tradeoffs can get you a solution faster.

The Problem: To display visual warning to users on a PDA (MDA Compact 3 & HTC Qtek S9100) when they cross the speed limit. Simple enough. But, there are strings attached. You have to build the feature on an existing solution which displays a map on the screen and provides navigation, traffic info to the users. The exisitng solution is keeping track of the location via gps <= every second and you have to use that data. Now, the display should be like the speed signs on the streets. You need to provide audio alerts too. Things are not simplified by the fact that, a version of TomTom will also be running on the PDA. PDA has 200MHz processor, 64MB RAM. There is the previous version with still limited features that, the software is to work. How do we show the sign/live feed on the screen ?  A sample sign 

Solution 1: Since we had the speed info from the existing components, we could simply draw our way through. A good drawing algorithms to put the street symbol with the speed data on the screen. After a couple of runs and stress tests (remember the existing load too), it was not very responsive plus the screen was left in an inconsistent state. Also, the platform was Microsoft Windows mobile, programming was done using embedded VC++  and Microsoft foundation classes.

Solution 2: Show the sign on a seperate window and use MFC window region classes. What about the Sign itself ? Store it in the memory. The device could spare some. So why not? The bottle neck was with the MFC classes in the device sdk. It was stripped down and did not have the full region functionalities. You can set the region but, how to define the circular region? Again a dead end.

At this time I was pretty much finished with Jeff Prosise's Programming windows with MFC. It and other old Wintellect books have been my favourite while on Microsoft platform. Not to mention Charles Petzold. At this time I remembered about Serialization. Yes, that can let you save the state of an object. Aha. So, I can define the region on my desktop and serialise the region classes. Read the region classes in the PDA and use them as I like. I ran back to my workstation to try this out and see the effects of the stress tests. And it worked. Next my test representative and myself took a version with the modification on a field test. It performed better than the other option.

Although there were a number of tradeoffs in terms of memory, response time etc, solution worked. I discussed it with my lead, tech consultant, project colleagues and we had a good laugh.