Dan's Blog |
Alternative to Ajax |
| Ajax is one of the hottest things today in web development. The ability to reload page content without having a
page blink, or having the delay of sending large amounts of HTML back and forth is absolutely wonderful.
In the fall of 2004 I was tasked with creating a web based application for an MLS provider out of NC. One of the things that I wanted to be able to do was to keep the users happy by reducing page load time. Had I known about Ajax at the time my job would have been simple. Instead, I had to come up with another solution. In order to accomplish the reduced page load time, I devised a way to use JavaScript and hidden frames to transport the data that I needed for the page rendering. TECHNICAL INFORMATION:
A simple way to accomplish this is to have a hidden frame called a transporter. This transporter would be tasked to retrieve information from the server. The URL that it was sent to recover would decode the get string and return the desired infromation in a logical format. Most importantly, this returned page would include a script that would push the logically formatted data to the calling page upon page load. This removes issues with state management and trying to simply grab the information from the page without knowing whether it had actually returned data or not. more to come... |
| Dan Bish Kernersville, NC |