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Thin Clients Who Got Too Fat (technical)
In creating the MAT production site, I used a lot of third-party .NET controls, as well as rolling some of my own. Gosh! It was a flashy site! I liked the look-and-feel well enough. I had pop-up help tips, sliders inside of grids, a dynamic help and menuing sytem. All very slick, until I had to do some maintenance on the site from the beach last week.
At the beach, all we had was a dial-up connection. I had a client that needed an assessment set up, so here I go dialing in.
Did I mention that I had all sorts of custom controls on the site?
For those of you who know, adding a lot of controls to your website in most cases means that you're keeping a lot of state. Keeping state in .NET aspx code generally consists of managing a lot of objects in a VIEWSTATE.
All of that -- that means that each page weighed in around 1MB! At the home office, on the T-1, it was a 10 second download and I was humming. But over that dial-up. Yikes. It was more painful than you can possibly imagine.
So now I'm getting ready to rewrite the UI layer. Shouldn't be that difficult, as all my logic is in my business layer (you programmers out there are tiering your code, even inside of components, right?) The problem is that I'm still wondering whether I should start on this right away. Don't most businesses have high-speed internet already? I can't imagine a larger business being on dial-up, does that happen anymore?
I haven't made a decision. Still thinking about it.
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