We're rewriting a website used by one of our clients. The user traffic on it is very low, less than 100 unique visitors a week. It's basically just a nice interface to their data in our databases. It allows them to query and filter on different sets of data of theirs.
We're rewriting the site in Python, re-using the same Oracle database that the data is currently on. The current version is written in an old, old version of Coldfusion. One of the things that Coldfusion does well though is displays tons of database records on a single page. It's capable of displaying hundreds of thousands of rows at once without crashing the browser. It uses a Java applet, and it looks like the contents of the rows are perhaps compressed and passed in through the HTML or something. There is a large block of data in the HTML but it's not displayed - it's just rendered by the Java applet.
I've tried several JavaScript solutions but they all hinge on the fact that the data will be present in an HTML table or something along those lines. This causes browsers to freeze and run out of memory.
Does anyone know of any solutions to this situation? Our client loves the ability to scroll through all of this data without clicking a "next page" link.
I have done just what you are describing using the following (which works very well):
It enables you to do 'fetch as you scroll' pagination, so you can disable the pagination arrows in favor of a 'forever' scroll.