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

[benh]

Is a session key really needed? if there going to book mark things
then the session will likely be gone by then (or log in needed...) are
you planning on havening the URL included enough that the query can be
run at any state? If you already have that and are just trying to give
the user some eyecandy while they wait then I think that there might
be other ways around this. I know that when I was trying out the Yahoo
Mail Beta, while the page loaded there was an animation that kept me
entertained for the 30 seconds (or so) for things to load. Then you
can use JS to manage the ajax call that happens under the wire, even
if thats just getting back a 'done' msg that then kicks them off to
another page to display the results.

On 8/2/07, Kevin Scaldeferri <kevin at scaldeferri.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
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-- 
benh~