Just wondering which is best here. I want to output data from a table in my DB then put a lot of this data into a html table on the fly on my page. I’m working with Java on the server side. Basically I pull the results form the DB and have the raw data..just what next?
There is a chance I may want to take data from multiple tables in order to combine it into one table for my site.
I retrieve the results of the query from the DB, now do I create a text from it in the form of json which I can parse as json using jquery upon the return of the object to my browser?(kind of a sub question of this question: Is just using a stringbuilder the correct way to make a json object to output?)
Or..
Should I build the HTML as a string and output that to the browser instead?
Which is better and why?
I’ve built entire pages from JSON data on the client. It reduces the redundancy of repeating HTML and can lead to better performance, depending on the complexity of your HTML.
I had large a catalog that used multiple tabs for different sections. Sending it all to the client as JSON and generating the resulting HTML was way faster than downloading the equivalent HTML.
What you lose, of course, is SEO. Search engines won’t be able to see the Javascript-generated output. There are ways around this, using hash URL techniques.