[Web-SIG] [Fwd: Summer of Code preparation]

[Alan Kennedy]

[Peter Hunt]
>> I think an interesting project would be complete integration of the
>> client and server via AJAX. That is, whenever a DHTML event handler
>> needs to be called on the client-side, the document state is serialized
>> and it is sent along with the DHTML event information to the server,
>> informing it that an event occured.

[Matt Goodall]
> Invoking something server-side every time there's some (interesting)
> event in the browser will almost certainly perform badly due to network
> latency and possibly put unnecessary load on the server.

I was going to refrain from this conversation, but now find the
following point relevant:

How long before we end up reinventing X-windows-style transmission of
UI events across the network, i.e. by sending all browser events over
HTTP to the server?

It's worth noting that, in the early days of X-windows, people said it
was far too heavyweight, and would saturate networks and quickly
become unusable. But those people reckoned without advances in network
technology, and the X-windows people claimed that they were
specifically designing for network technologies from several years in
the future, by which time their software technology would be mature
and ready to take advantage of the newer and higher bandwidths. And
they were pretty much right: having used X-windows over corporate WANs
since the early 1990s, I think it works pretty well.

But the X-windows people weren't designing for Internet scale: how
many connections should a server be able to handle?

> Serializing and sending document state will only make it slower.

Agreed: serialising and transmitting whole documents is taking it too far ;-)

Regards,

Alan.