State Management - Overcoming Data-Centric RIA Challenges
The 3rd chapter of the major challenges we pinpoint when coming to develop data-centric rich internet applications discusses state management. A major part of any web-app developers process, is to decide whether or not to keep the state of a particular control or function and what data to retrieve from the server. While with stateful environment developers work within a structured, well-defined and visual environment in a stateless environment developers work in a fluid environment and have to take critical decisions and choices by themselves. The stateless environment is much more complex and risky as the developer also needs to write explicit code for each element based on their decision. Visual WebGui offers a solution that unlike ASP.NET and most web frameworks is stateful.
Most ASP.NET developers will agree that the stateless ASP.NET visual designer is completely useless for data-entry or data presentation layouts design as well as for almost all other usages, but stateful solutions, however, come with two main concerns due to the memory size it usually consumes that affects the scalability and level of concurrent users the application could handle. Both of those concerns are solved by Visual WebGui.
Stateful solutions are considered heavy on server memory, preventing you from working with completely dynamic load-balancing solutions and web servers farm. Visual WebGui’s solution removes this issue by keeping a ‘floating state’ (storing the state in a database or other type of state cache). Furthermore, being highly optimized on the state memory usage (consuming less than 1/10 of the full state size), makes its memory usage very low enabling the user to be directed by load balancing solutions to different servers dynamically and efficiently. Additionally, because of the minimal memory usage on the server, VWG’s stateful solution can enable 800 plus concurrent users (compared to ASP.NET which, according to Microsoft’s own recommendation, is only capable of between 200-400).
You can find more information about this unique approach and technology here.