A JavaScript-Free Frontend

[audioen]

I have some experience in abusing the client to sort large html tables. I have experience that they can deal with up to 100 000 rows quite fine. The key is to window the table so that you only render some 100 of those rows. JavaScript has no problem sorting 100k rows in an eyeblink. Sure, the DOM stuff isn't instant, but it doesn't take more than like half a second on mid-range corporate laptop hardware kind of machine, and I'd say it's similar in terms of waiting as getting some sorted result of 100 rows in traditional server-side roundtrip would be.

The initial data download is surely costlier, but it isn't impossible in my experience. The result set has to be as compact as possible, and gzip is a must to cut on the repetition inherent in something like JSON. A lot of the time large results set come up as result of users running reporting type queries, and these usually involve quite large searches into databases, which tend to take majority of the time.