[whartung]

Nice way to incrementally add capabilities to an existing app.

Back in the day, with Java JSP, there was a tag library called DisplayTag, which handled tables. It did a similar thing for in place paging, albeit a bit more brute force.

All JSP pages are buffered as they’re rendered. When the tag was rendered in “Ajax” mode, at the start of the tag it simply flushed the buffer, thus eliminating anything generated before, and at the end it simply aborted the remainder of the page. This effectively just returned the entire table element in isolation from the rest of the page.

It was a clever mechanic at the time.