Team Eiffel

In the previous posts I explained that the EJAX page formatter takes an existing HTML page and a collection of responses and emits that as the HTML page to the browser. There is another reason for this architecture and that it is now easy to implement load-balancing and improve responsiveness.

The reason is that we can select not to apply or generate a response when the page is requested, but defer that. For example we could insert an iframe with a URL to a reponse. The browser will request that iframe when the page has loaded and we can make the page (inter)active before waiting for that response. Or we could use XHR (XmlHttpRequest), or AJAX, to retrieve portions of the page in the background, asynchronously.

The responses can come from different servers as well of course. All this helps to achieve a page that appears faster: it is generated faster because less processing is done on the server, and it appears faster on a user's screen because it is smaller: less bytes to send over the network.

So the proper architecture gives us options at deployment time. Depending on if we're serving a local network or to browsers on a mobile phone, we can target what portions of the page to send now and what to send later.