Following up from the first article I wrote here back in late 2006 there are around 200 pages (articles) here now, they are maturing, meaning I am editing live articles when I think they can be improved and linking articles here hopefully showing a little more "joined-up thinking".
However this article is to re-emphasise the fact that there is really only one page on this site, despite what you read in the address bar or see when you save this or any page in your bookmarks.
The architecture of this site centres around one page acting as a container into which run-time controls are loaded.
The UI control is the main control used for displaying all you read in the main body of the page.
Admittedly this control is used on every page so far, so its usage doesn’t quite fulfil the “loaded at run-time when needed” paradigm because it loaded on every page.
The UI control works along with some early stages in the pipeline of processing involved in you requesting a page and the Web Server responding to your request.
The page title or URL (they are made to be the same) of this page is actually part of a record held in the database the Web Server fetches the pages from.
So when a new article, say this one, is added to the database the title given to the article will appear as the page title and as the URL (Web address) of this page.
Sticking with the UI control for a moment longer, I need to be sure you can find this article on here on the Web where there are millions
See article on Google indexing: GET YOUR MESSAGE OUT
Back to the idea of controls like the UI control being loaded when needed, on a page by page basis, I just want to emphasise that when these controls are loaded and appear on several pages (like the UI controls does on all the readable pages), they do serve up different information from page to page.
Hopefully you now have the idea that controls can be loaded when required, but they do serve up different information when they are repeatedly used.
So when are these different controls loaded and what determines whether they are loaded or unloaded at all?
The short answer is it’s information.
At this stage in this sites short history (since it’s re-launch) it’s information held in the database records.
A simple example is the PDA control, a little icon appears on the left when an article has extra resources with it, such as code for developers, audio, video or in fact any additional “digital media” that goes with a particular page.
More advanced options based on individual user driven requirements are being added now, all ready to be loaded into this one page.