Client vs server-based calculation
HTML, Flash and iPhone/Android calculate in the browser
Both SpreadsheetConverter HTML, Flash and iPhone/Android do all calculations inside the browser. There are several advantages with this:
- You get the best speed, since the network is not involved once the web page is downloaded.
- Browser-based applications scale very well to handle many simultaneous users, since your web server is only serving the page to the browser, after which everything is done locally.
- This solution provides off-line calculation. With SpreadsheetConverter iPhone/Android, it may be crucial that the calculator works also without a network connection.
ASP.NET calculates on the server
With the ASP.NET flavor of the product, the browser only does the presentation of the calculation, not the calculation itself.
In order to get the best graphical experience, we use AJAX to update the web page in the background. The user experience is unchanged, since the cells immediately show updated values.
Advantages with server-based calculations:
- For very large spreadsheets, the calculations are faster, especially if only a part of the spreadsheet is visible on the web page.
- Thanks to AJAX technology, SpreadsheetConverter can create a very responsive user interface also for server-based applications. Read more about AJAX in Wikipedia.
- It is much easier to integrate your solution with back-end systems and databases.
- This is the best solution for password-protected web pages, since the pages cannot be used without access to the server.
- Since most of the programming code runs on the web server, the web page becomes smaller and can be downloaded faster.
Illustrations
The first state diagrams shows how SpreadsheetConverter HTML, Flash and iPhone/Android pages work.
The second state diagrams shows how SpreadsheetConverter ASP.NET and Classic ASP pages work.
With SpreadsheetConverter Java/JSP, the whole page is sent from the web server to the client after each calculation.
