Minimizing the JSF ViewState for large page

Question

I'm currently developing a JSF application with single-page-per-app design, such like in desktop apps. the sections are placed in tabs, and every suboperation, such as editing or inserting item, in displayed in dialog.

What is becoming the issue, it is both the size of ViewState and the processing time of each request. At the moment, the initial size of ViewState in POST is 200kb (and the compression is enabled). The request last from 200 to 400 ms (on my own machine, with no users except me).

Setting state saving to session greatly reduces the request, but greatly increases the processing time - now it's from 350 to 600 ms. Because this is intranet application, net transfer is cheap, so better to send more that process longer.

I don't know how to deal with that problem. Is it possible to reduce the space consumed by JSF components? Most of them don't change on every click, but they seem to be deserialized and processed anyway. Or should I throw out every data (such as dictionaries for drop-down lists) from JSF beans and use intensive caching in service layer? Or there are other options/tricks/improvements I could use?

Answer 1

As you have already figured out, the View State of the entire form is being serialized on every ansynchronous post back so that the server and client can stay in sync. ASP.NET works in pretty much the exact same way.

The Primefaces team has added functionality to many of their Ajax enabled components that allow for Partial Page posts.

http://blog.primefaces.org/?p=1842

The partialSubmit property will only serialize form elements that are specified in the process attribute of the component or <p:ajax> . Of course this is only a solution for Primefaces components, but it has significantly reduced the request size on some of my larger JSF pages.

Answer 2

You can utilize IFrames and session variables to reduce component trees. Each iframe will maintains its own view. Of course in back end process your application is no longer a single page application. However user will still seamlessly see it as a single age applications.