Active Client Pages: Chrys`s Approach

Introduction

If you have a web site with an image gallery, and your users are using a slow Internet connection, the pictures will take a long time to download. With Active Client Pages, only the first image (or first set of images) or even no image at all of your web site, will take a long time to download; the rest (or all) of your images will come very fast.

If you are working from a database at a server (doing web development, say) and your server is too busy because so many people are using your server, guess what? You can have the database programming activity, which is supposed to be at the server, done at the client’s computer. Many professional web sites use server-side applications like PHP, ASP, JSP etc. to generate their pages. If you are good in JavaScript and do not want to pay more for hosting because of active server page technology, the time has come for you to pay less, and not use active server pages.

Web pages are becoming voluminous because authors like to make them active; because of this, the pages take time to download. But now, you can have your web page downloaded in bits.

All of this can happen thanks to Active Client Technology, discovered by Vlad Podvorny in the years 2002-2003 and Chuck Bradley in the year 2006, and enhanced by me, Chrysanthus Forcha, in 2007. Both Vlad and Chuck gave the name Active Client Pages (ACP) to the discovery. They discovered it independently.

The approach in this series is mine. It is based on Vlad and Chuck’s works, with a lot of additions from me.

You need good knowledge of JavaScript and HTML in order to understand this series.

How I became interested in Active Client Pages

I am a freelance computer programmer. One of my clients, whose users have slow Internet connections, asked me to do some simple web development for his transport company. He has inter-city buses and he wanted people to be able to register, pay their fare and choose their bus seats through the Internet. The problem I had was finding a way to make the users able to do their transaction fast over the Internet, as they fill out the forms of the different pages.

Naturally, I went to the net to find articles or tutorials with a solution to the problem; this was in 2005. That was when I discovered Vlad’s articles and his web site. Then I started thinking about Active Client Pages and how they can be improved. I discovered Chuck’s Approach in 2007.

This Article

In this article I present my approach to Active Client Pages. I call it Chrys’s Approach. I got my inspiration from Vlad's and Chuck’s works. I derived the Script and Ajax Approach from Vlad and Chuck’s works, respectively. I have written two short series about the Script and Ajax Approaches already. My approach is a combination of the Script and the Ajax Approaches, plus other enhancements I made.