I have been working on AJAX framework, mainly DWR, for quite sometime. One of the interesting requirements which came through was about a dynamic tooltip. This tooltip is supposed to pull out the attributes of an object from a web-application server and show it to the user in the tooltip and this use case will be triggered from a normal search results page. Sounds cool for the user and in one way, it looks like we can have an optimal solution in terms of retrieving minimal data. Any details the user wants will be pulled out at runtime and shown as a tooltip. The optimal solution is based on how the caching is implemented so that we don’t generate multiple hits for the same object.However, if we dont have built in caching for this, the very implementation can turn out to be a problem in that the user can literally pound the server with calls of repeated nature and returning the same set of data. Caching on the client side was an option and eventually the whole caching approach had to be abandoned due to the lack of time on the client’s part.
Since the user base is small and we dont anticipate a huge growth in the user base, the decision to abandon the caching mechanism may not be as critical an issue as thought out to be.
