roncli.com blog: Ajax Security & User Friendliness

Currently, I am going through the Six Minutes To Release website and making all sorts of updates and changes to the input interface. Basically, I've decided that UpdatePanels are far too slow for my needs on pages where user interaction is heavy, and I decided to instead go with implementing the ICallbackEventHandler.

I think I discussed Ajax security a while back and came to the conclusion then that it wasn't ready for prime time. Since then, I've been doing a lot of reading up on the subject, and have found that ICallbackEventHandler provides a way to keep page state through your Ajax calls, thus resulting in the important things that I have stored on the server controlable by me, such as whether or not the user is logged in and so on. The added bonus is that I can update the page through JavaScript and THEN send the data to the server to update the database. The result is an instant update as soon as you click on something, and it's very nice.

Now, in reality, things aren't instant, but the user doesn't have to know that. This is also only really useful for non-critical functions... I wouldn't trust any account information with this method. However, signing up for raids, having a raid leader change a raider's raiding status, things that aren't going to make or break the site... these are acceptable to me to use this "instant update" method.

And the main reason I did this was to improve the slow method of using UpdatePanel. I like UpdatePanel for one-time deals, like submitting a form, but when you're using the page's controls over and over again, UpdatePanel is too slow for my taste, and Solitha found that the page kind of sucks to have to wait to update something, wait a second or two, update again, wait, update, and so on. User friendliness is something I know I need to work on with my web sites, and using Six Minutes To Release as a learning ground for this is going to help me in that department a lot. I look forward to being able to use stuff like this.

Labels: AJAX, Coding, ICallbackEventHandler, Six Minutes To Release, UpdatePanel

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