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Ajax = Fast scalable user interfaceDawn Rossi, 01-16-2008 |
The SoftwareProjects Shopping Cart is a hosted shopping cart solution, designed to effectively handle an unlimited number of products, listings, stores and categories.
In a recent client implementation, we had to handle a site with 2 million products, 17 stores, 14,536 categories and 6 million listings.
It was a popular comparison shopping website, allowing users to view product information, reviews and compare prices for 2 million products.
After testing several vendors, our client picked the SoftwareProjects shopping cart as the back-end engine and administration system to power the entire site.
As part of this post I'd like to focus on some of the front-end challenges involved with such a system.
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Building a back-office administrator user interface that is required to deliver super fast data management, across millions of products and thousands of categories, is not an easy task.
We've used Ajax heavily across all modules, to offload processing and minimize the amount of information that is displayed at any given point in time.
Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a set of Javascript technologies that allow dyncamilly updating subsets of a page, without having to refresh the entire page.
Imagine for example a basic Product Information screen:
This screen allows the shopping cart administrator to view information about one individual product and make changes to the product name, description, vendor, category etc.
Let's say we're viewing the "Self Adhesive Paper Fastener" product.
One of the database fields indicates the category this product belongs to.
What's the most intuitive way to display the current category? A select-box usually works best.
But what happens when you try populating that select box with all available categories for easy switching? When you have 14,536 categories - the page takes forever to load and system performance degrades.
This is one example where Ajax is a perfect fit. Ajax allows us to fetch information from the database as it pertains to one level of the categories tree at a time.
The result? User friendly, intuitive, super fast experience:
Next time you're building your forms, think scale!
Design your forms to gracefully handle 100 times of the average user's volume.
Ajax rocks.
In a recent client implementation, we had to handle a site with 2 million products, 17 stores, 14,536 categories and 6 million listings.
It was a popular comparison shopping website, allowing users to view product information, reviews and compare prices for 2 million products.
After testing several vendors, our client picked the SoftwareProjects shopping cart as the back-end engine and administration system to power the entire site.
As part of this post I'd like to focus on some of the front-end challenges involved with such a system.
--
Building a back-office administrator user interface that is required to deliver super fast data management, across millions of products and thousands of categories, is not an easy task.
We've used Ajax heavily across all modules, to offload processing and minimize the amount of information that is displayed at any given point in time.
Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a set of Javascript technologies that allow dyncamilly updating subsets of a page, without having to refresh the entire page.
Imagine for example a basic Product Information screen:
This screen allows the shopping cart administrator to view information about one individual product and make changes to the product name, description, vendor, category etc.
Let's say we're viewing the "Self Adhesive Paper Fastener" product.
One of the database fields indicates the category this product belongs to.
What's the most intuitive way to display the current category? A select-box usually works best.
But what happens when you try populating that select box with all available categories for easy switching? When you have 14,536 categories - the page takes forever to load and system performance degrades.
This is one example where Ajax is a perfect fit. Ajax allows us to fetch information from the database as it pertains to one level of the categories tree at a time.
The result? User friendly, intuitive, super fast experience:
Next time you're building your forms, think scale!
Design your forms to gracefully handle 100 times of the average user's volume.
Ajax rocks.
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