The Rebirth of the Client-Server Architecture
What Acculence has done with our framework is to put the presenter closer to the user—inside the browser. This provides for nearly instant feedback to user actions. In a typical web application, a user event in the browser (clicking on a button, for example) results in a message being sent to the presenter on the server. This presenter will process the event and most likely request an update to the model, which will require processing by the application tier before an update occurs in the database. The presenter must wait for all of this to occur before it can offer any feedback to the user. This can often cause a delay of several seconds or more.
Even worse, most existing presentation frameworks require the entire user interface to be regenerated on the server before being transmitted in whole back to the browser, even if only a small portion, such as an order quantity, has changed. This re-rendering, retransmission and redisplay of the user interface takes even more time, wastes bandwidth, and unnecessarily overloads the server. Our component-based client architecture recursivley generates finer-and-finer-grained XML for rendering by the browser, in the browser, in a method reminiscent of the PAC pattern. XML is well-suited for this type of hierarchical data representation.
Emerging AJAX and "Web 2.0" toolkits partially address these problems, but not fully. Many are designed to augment, rather than supplant existing post-back architectures. We've simply re-engineered the existing model from the ground up to be more like a client-server architecture. However, since the client is accessed over the web, we maintain the important advantage achieved by the web in deployability and configurability.
Acculence’s browser-based applications represent the next generation of the web. And unlike most enterprise architectures which start out with the best intentions but wind up as a big ball of mud, Acculence's framework has been created by a small, highly-focused team of talented developers.