Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5

Chapter 5. Building Client-Side Widgets

In Chapter 3, you learned how to build two server-side widgets: one for RSS/Atom feeds and one to display Flickr photos. The benefit of a server-side widget is that you can use Visual Studio’s comfortable development environment to write and debug code, but also use your favorite programming language, like C# or VB.NET. How-ever, server-side widgets slow down page loading and require too many postbacks. All the widgets on the page are loaded on the server side during page load and asynchronous postback. So, if the widgets load data from an external source, the page load time becomes the cumulative loading time of all widgets. Moreover, server-side widgets require too many postbacks on simple actions like paging or editing items on a grid. There’s no way to avoid the postback because you are storing the object model on the server side and you fetch data from server side. Nothing is stored on the client that can help facilitate client-side operations. Although server-side widgets are easier to develop and maintain, they actually offer poor performance compared to client-side widgets.

On the other hand, client-side widgets use mostly JavaScript, so they can offer a lot more interactivity and functionality on the browser without requiring any postback. Because client-side widgets fetch data from external sources right from the Java-Script and maintain object model and state on the client, they offer functionality like paging, editing, and sorting ...