View part of a web application - what technology for a pretty intensive grid view?

Question

Hi everybody,

I'm about to have to write a web page/app that will serve the agenda for circa 100 people on a page. One line per person, one column per day with 3 clickable zones in each cell.

In HTML, the page is way complex for the browser to load quick and there is no possibility to click on a border between 2 cells to for example split an event that spreads among several cells.

So I search an not too overkilling technology to render this kind of view. I begun with a PHP generated HTML page but the number of elements in the page make the mouse move jerky.

Moving to JAVA would give me better performances regarding the reuse of the generator of the view but it will still be an HTML page.

So, here is my question: do you think that going forward with JAVA and its graphical capability is the simple solution or is Flash a better option for this part of a Web App? I'm afraid of the code I'll have to write in JAVA to handle the GUI presentation as well as the events generated by the 1000's cells plus borders of the page. In Flash, the graphical part seems simpler even if the actions handling is still huge.

I'd really like to have your feedback on this one. Thanks to everybody.

Answer 1

You could try Flex, which outputs Flash movies (SWF files), you have a very extensive data visualization library to show your data. For example, you can use DataGrid or AdvancedDataGrid, specify columns, itemRenders for headers and cells which can be very complicated controls, etc. And the grids only render cells that appear in the viewport; if, say, you have 1,000 rows of data but the user's browser can only show 25 rows at a time, only 25 are rendered and scrolling switches the dataprovider's view rather than attempts to scroll 1,000 fully rendered rows.

Flex is fast for UI development but robust for handling data. My company uses it with Java and PureMVC, and it has worked very well for us.

Answer 2

I'm almost done with a new version of my Census RIA benchmark app that shows how different technologies handle loading and rendering large amounts of data. Check it out at: http://www.jamesward.com/census2