Thank's!
This sounds like a well designed solution. I have two comments:
1) You wrote:
"spin off a thread that takes care of the time consuming operation and pass that thread the user's session (and therefore the result object0 to store the result in."
Is this a safe operation to perform within a
J2EE application server and/or a web server? I thought threading was one of the things the appserver ought to handle automatically?
2) You also wrote:
"a possible solution is to provide a template in each page that displays the state of any outstanding work belonging to the user by checking the session for the result object and checking its state. If no result object exists then nothing is shown, otherwise its state is shown together with a link to a page that can extract the result object from session and display the result"
Our application is a "fat" web client. That is, it is implemented with payloads of DIV tags and Javascripting, and only access the web server when it's time for bulk operations (+10 secs) that I mentioned in my previous posting.
I mention this because I think this template solution would work just fine if the application make a HTTP request to the web server every time the user "clicks" in the GUI. But for us the "template" would have to check the session in a hidden form or something. Could this be done?
Are there better alternatives, since I have got the impression that hidden forms are "dirty" design?