Professional DotNetNuke®5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET

Chapter 10. Client API

One of the main goals in developing a web site or a web application is to provide the best possible experience for the users. To achieve this goal, the developer must do many things, including but not limited to creating a pleasant look and feel for the site, making the application intuitive for the end users, and finally, keeping the time it takes to communicate between the client and server as limited as possible. That last item has been a challenge for web site developers for years.

When a user goes to a web site, the remote web server performs a series of events. It receives the request, processes events required by the web application, and then sends the rendered HTML to the client browser. These events are processed on the server side. What this means is the server must use valuable resources to parse each page and then send it to the client browser as HTML. This is often seen as a disadvantage. One of the major advantages of using server side is that it is browser independent. Therefore you theoretically don't have to worry about variations between browsers. Everything done by the ASP.NET framework is done on the server side.

When events are rendered on the user's machine instead of on the remote server, they are rendered on the client side. The major advantage of using client side is that each web browser uses its own resources to execute the code found on the web page, thus taking the workload away from the remote web server. The main disadvantages ...