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Deciding When to Use Client-Side Components
You should use client-side components whenever you want greater control over the appearance of your application. In general, client-side components have these advantages over server-side dynamic elements:
- Client-side components define a state-synchronization phase that does not reload the page.
- Client-side components are more flexible than server-side dynamic elements.
As you learned in the first chapter, WebObjects applications are event driven. The events that trigger actions are HTTP requests. A WebObjects application receives an HTTP request from the client, processes it, and returns a response page. That is, the only communication that takes place between the client and the WebObjects application on the server results in a page being redrawn (or a new page being generated).
When client-side components are used, an HTTP request can result in either the resynchronization of state or the return of a new page. Thus, state can be synchronized without the page having to be redrawn (see Figure 13).
Server-side dynamic elements always generate HTML, which means that they are limited to what HTML looks like and what HTML can do. You can create client-side components that look like just about any imaginable control: a dynamic calendar, a spreadsheet, or a graphing tool. To learn how to create a client-side component, see the chapter "Creating Client-Side Components".
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