Building an Image Gallery with Active Client Pages
(Page 1 of 4 )
When you have a web page in front of you that is of an image gallery and your Internet connection is slow, you will notice that, when you click a button or link to see the next image, this next image generally takes a long time to appear. If you read this two-part series, visitors to your web site will no longer have to wait a long time for images to appear in their entirety. Thanks to a new technology called Active Client Pages, abbreviated ACP, only the first image or the first set of images will take a long time to appear on the screen.
Introduction
In the first part of the series I consider the case when you have only one page, with about 30 images. In the second part of the series I consider the case where you have categories of images (images in different categories of an institution, for example).
You need basic knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, Ajax and Perl to understand this two-part series.
In this part of the series I consider only the case where you have a single page.
Active Client Pages
Active Client Pages is defined as the production of HTML pages at the client computer by the browser using web technology.
The secret of Active Client Pages lies in the fact that after the first page has been downloaded by the browser, other pages or data are downloaded in advance in the background, without the user knowing, and stored in an HTML master page (or frameset). This master page or frameset is the first page downloaded. By the time the user has finished dealing with the first page, the information for the next few pages would have arrived at the browser. When the user needs the next page or data, the browser displays it from the store (master page).
This Chapter
The secret given above is applicable to large projects similar to the one we shall see in the next chapter. Our project in this chapter will feature one web page with about 30 images, and we want each image to be displayed after the other without any delay. The secret here is that, apart from the first image that is downloaded with the web page, the rest of the images are downloaded in advance, after the first image and the web page have been downloaded. We shall see how to achieve all of this below.
Next: The Strategy >>
More HTML Articles
More By Chrysanthus Forcha
