Method for a bandwidth adaptive Web user interface

Method for a bandwidth adaptive Web user interface

Nowadays Web user interfaces of products are more and more complex, with a lot of features, options and interactions with the final users, leveraging also on AJAX technology to perform asynchronous calls to the server. Typically, Web 2.0 user interfaces require a lot of bandwidth in order to grant responsiveness to the user, because they handle a lot of data coming from the server. This requirement is usually satisfied because network infrastructures provide typically a very large bandwidth that is enough even to manage concurrent users requiring a lot of data from servers.

But what happens when the user does not have a large bandwidth connection or, for instance, the bandwitdth can vary in a very large interval as time goes by? This is the typical case of a user connected to the internet through a 3G network, where bandwidth tends to vary because of other concurrent users activity, or for the received signal power, or because user moves and get a weak signal leading to a small bandwidth available.

Then, the consequence is to have, in that situation, an available bandwidth that can vary a lot during the period user interacts with the Web user interface. This brings to a very unconstant response time (defined as the interval that the user needs to wait to get the server response after he/she performs any action against the user interface itself), and if the available bandwitdh is reduced, user could need to wait a long time to get a response.

Very often, the server response content of an user request could have a graphical part (for instance, a background, an icon image, and so on), that represents the biggest percentage (in terms of data size) of the whole response itself (for the nature of images that require more bytes than the textual data), but that is only useful to provide a more pleasant representation of the information itself. In case of limited bandwidth available, the presence of useless elements in the server response, but having a big size in terms of bytes, can slow down the Web user interface responsiveness.

To answer this problem here is disclosed a mechanism that adapts the Web user interface to the available bandwidth, so that when a limited available bandwidth is detected, the useless part of a server response will be minimised in order to keep the Web user responsiveness.

The disclosure proposes a method for a Web user interface able to adapt to reduced/varying available bandwitdth between the client and the server. The new Web user interface constantly monitors the bandwitdh between client and server. When it detects that the bandwidth is reduced, it adds an opportune parameter, into any request to the server, indicating to the server itself to provide "compressed" responses.

A the other hand, when the server gets any request from the client, it parses that parameter; if a compressed response is required by the client, the server logic provides a compressed v...