Ajax: The “Husky” Client

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, April 28, 2006 @ 10:28 am

Scott Dietzen over at Zimbra has a post in a continuing series on AJAX scalability. Besides coining the humorous term "Husky" Client to describe AJAX -- not quite thin, but not quite fat -- he makes some excellent points about the importance of design and choosing the appropriate browser/server boundary for an application in order to minimize the impact on the server.

I thought the following early paragraph was a nice observation by someone who clearly has a bit of experience developing applications:

Traditional fat client applications, on the other hand, off-load all of
the UI and most of the business logic (modulo stored procedures and
triggers) from the server to the client. Fat client app's could
nevertheless hammer their servers simply by not being sophisticated
about how much and how often data was being requested---that is, data shipping to the client can be more expensive than function shipping
to the server (with stored procedures, triggers, et al). With a
reasonably smart design, however, fat client applications typically use
more client and less server CPU per operation than a corresponding
server-centric application.

I think the generation of RIA's (Rich Interaction Application) that are about to sweep the web are likely going to repeat many of the mistakes of the client/server age. As Scott points out, how poorly these applications perform is going to be in part dependent on how well they are designed. As Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

agile ajax

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