Tuesday, December 11, 2007

The refresh problem of a web page?

I heard many time that people have problems when refreshing a web page. Well, I really do not understand it and I would like that someone points me to a concrete example.

I agree totally that a stateless application has problems when doing a page refresh but then I would not call it an application but a service or something like that. My opinion is that an application needs some state representation and according to that state you can access stateless services. Thus, when doing a refresh you just show the same things that the user was seeing before the refresh.

Ok ok, what if you have 10000000 .... users ? What if an atomic bomb .... ? :) I have read a nice post about user data management sometimes ago but I forgot where I saw it. I will post the link as soon as I find it.

Actually, the article was stating that with 256 megs you can have a loooot of users, on which I agree totally. Of course, you can have a lot of data in the user session but what about load balancing, caches and ...

So, is memory the real problem for saving the state on the server side?

I think that on a technical level using AOP, Spring AOP / interceptors can be considered and used to solve the refresh problem.