html div
id: ’someid’;
with: ‘Searching…’
waitMax: 30 seconds
forWork: [self getDataFromLongRunningProcess]
thenRender: [:r :value | r text: value]

Thanks Ramon, for the best seaside blog of them all!

This isn’t normally a problem in other frameworks because they don’t keep things like pages and controls alive between multiple requests like Seaside does, but, it is something you have to be aware of if you try and do something like I did in this article, because otherwise you’ll see all your processes that you expect to run asynchronously running serially and you won’t know why.

When not doing Ajax, you’d never notice this anyway, but Ajax allows a page to kick off multiple threads on the server and do work asyncronously, which personally, I find highly useful, for much more than loading data.

I used this because I had some local data I could show right away, and then some other related data from remote systems that may or may not come back, and take several seconds to fetch. This allowed me to show the user what I had instantly and inform them, in the page widgets, that more data was being fetched, and when it comes in it’ll display. I consider this little piece of code critical to the user experience in my applications. Consider how useful this might be in a mashup where you get data from many sources you might not control, or want to wait for.