I'm working on a CMS based on Jackrabbit. The UI is a RIA, of sorts. The user is presented with a file tree structure. If they are at the root folder, then the tree is pretty big. I *need* to have the whole data model in order to build the file tree in the UI, but it's an obviously costly act. I'm now trying to determine my options for making this process more efficient. Here's a couple I've thought of, and I'm hoping that someone will provide some guidance.
1) I could load only a portion of the tree, then use Ajax techniques to lazy load the deeper folders in the tree as the user works through them 2) I could implement a caching layer in my application that holds the tree structure. It could track it's stale branches and only refresh those when necessary 3) I'm thinking that I could somehow just use the Jackrabbit API better . . . really, all I need are the names of the children; currently I'm creating the "folder" and "document" objects for the whole tree as I create the tree. Perhaps it's cleaner to just get the children by name, or uuid. How have other people handled this?
