NYCPHP Meetup

NYPHP.org

[nycphp-talk] the stale V in MVC web apps

David Mintz david at davidmintz.org
Wed Mar 4 10:49:01 EST 2009


I've got users working collaboratively all day long on a set of database
records. The view in front of them is frequently stale. A common old Web 1.0
approach to solve this was to reload the page automatically every n seconds
with a meta refresh. Nowadays we have xhr. Either way, my concern is as the
W3C points out, an unexpected refresh can disorient users.

I have thought of displaying a thingy at page load time that says "reloading
automatically in 5 minutes" and then updating via Javscript it to count
down  4, 3, 2 and after maybe 30 seconds start counting off seconds, then
update via ajax. The upside is they won't get (or at least shouldn't be)
surprised. The downside is more clutter, potentially annoying and/or
distracting. But I think you could put a discrete little timer thingy that
ought not be too irritating.

I understand the problem is so common that someone has coined "Asynchronous
MVC."

What do YOU do about this sort of thing?

-- 
David Mintz
http://davidmintz.org/

The subtle source is clear and bright
The tributary streams flow through the darkness
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.nyphp.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20090304/8cafbb28/attachment.html>


More information about the talk mailing list