A client-server architecture for state-dependent dynamic visualizations on the web

As sophisticated enterprise applications move to the Web, some advanced user experiences become difficult to migrate due to prohibitively high computation, memory, and bandwidth requirements. State-dependent visualizations of large-scale data sets are particularly difficult since a change in the client's context necessitates a change in the displayed results. This paper describes a Web architecture where clients are served a session-specific image of the data, with this image divided into tiles dynamically generated by the server. This set of tiles is supplemented with a corpus of metadata describing the immediate vicinity of interest; additional metadata is delivered as needed in a progressive fashion in support and anticipation of the user's actions. We discuss how the design of this architecture was motivated by the goal of delivering a highly responsive user experience. As an example of a complete application built upon this architecture, we present OrgMaps, an interactive system for navigating hierarchical data, enabling fluid, low-latency navigation of trees of hundreds of thousands of nodes on standard Web browsers using only HTML and JavaScript.