[Pdx-pm] Making web pages that display "working on your request"

[Kevin Scaldeferri]

On Aug 2, 2007, at 6:29 PM, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

>>>>>> "Kevin" == Kevin Scaldeferri <kevin at scaldeferri.com> writes:
>
> Kevin> Well, I'm working on a site where people explicitly are  
> going to want
> Kevin> to point other people to the results of queries, and most  
> people expect
> Kevin> to do that by "Cmd-L Cmd-C ... change applications... Cmd- 
> V", and you
> Kevin> just broke that.  Now the user has to figure out how the  
> heck to send a
> Kevin> link to someone else via whatever custom method your website  
> decided to
> Kevin> use.
>
> So you're planning on keeping the results of *every* query *ever*  
> done?
> I hope you have a budget for infinite disk.


Well, no...

I had already considered your basic solution and rejected it because  
I needed bookmarkable URLs before I sent my original email.  I'm  
sorry I didn't explicitly mention that before going into talking  
about AJAX and such.

(Also, ideally I'd be feeding back a blow-by-blow of what's going on  
to the user: "Queried server A... Got X from server A, querying  
servers B, C, and D...." until the query returns, because the users  
are the sorts who would like to get all the gritty details of what's  
going on.)


It does occur to me, though, that because there's no hidden state in  
my application, just pure idempotent GETs, that there's no reason to  
cache using a random session key.  I can cache data using a hash of  
the query parameters, which allows me to keep bookmarkable URLs, and  
do the meta-refresh trick.   I'll probably hack that up quickly to  
stop people complaining too much until I can finish a more dynamic  
solution.


-kevin