The New Design Pattern - W AJAX

Filed in archive AJAX on July 13, 2006

On waelchatila.com, Wael Chatila talks about a new design pattern called the "W AJAX Pattern". This pattern was discovered while he and his partner, Will Glass were discussing the loading time of a web application which they were working on.

He has given a picture along with the steps regarding how it works.

1. User submits a search request with HTTP POST
2. A non-blocking request to the geodata server is issued in a spawned thread that is associated with the session. A web page layout with no geo data is returned to the browser.
3. Browser sends of an AJAX request with the purpose of retrieving geo data. Browser continues rendering the web page layout and elements.
4. AJAX request arrives at webserver and does a blocking wait for geo data to arrive. Geo data is finally calculated and results are sent back to the webserver. Webserver relays geo data to the AJAX request which returns.
5. Data is received by browser and presented in a quick manner using DHTML

This enabled the response down to come around to three seconds and why it is called "W AJAX" because the calling pattern which was traced out in the image resembled a "W" and an "U" and on combining this with how "W" is pronounced in English one would get a visual "W" and a phonetic "U".