Responsive Interaction for a Large Web Application: The Meteor Shower Architecture in the WebWriter II Editor.

Abstract

Traditional server-based web applications allow access to server-hosted resources, but often exhibit poor responsiveness due to server load and network delays. Client-side webapplications, on the other hand, provide excellent interactivity at the expense of limitedaccess to server resources. The WebWriter II Editor, a direct manipulation HTML editor that runs in a web browser, uses both server-side and client-side processing in order toachieve the advantages of both. In particular, this editor downloads the document datastructure to the browser and performs all operations locally. The user interface is based onHTML frames and includes individual frames for previewing the document and displayinggeneral and specific control panels. All editing is done by JavaScript code residing inroughly twenty HTML pages that are downloaded into these frames as needed. Such aclient-server architecture, based on frames, client-side data structures, and multipleJavaScript-enhanced HTML pages appears promising for a wide variety of applications. This paper describes this architecture, the Meteor Shower Application Architecture, and itsuse in the WebWriter II Editor.