Online services like Facebook, Gmail and others deliver only a small amount of data initially (e.g. only the first 20 statuses or 50 emails...). The general idea is to get the smallest data set possible and to work correctly even on slow Internet connections.
One of the challenges we face is that all school data should be loaded before the timetable is drawn on the initial screen. That means that all entered subjects, rooms, teachers, classes and their groups and lessons, including various constraints, need to be loaded first. In large schools/universities with 500 and more subjects/teachers that can take a while.
We have taken this challenge seriously and made lots of optimizations for loading, saving and importing timetables:
- All data sent over the wire is compressed, making it 5-20x smaller than before.
- Once a timetable is loaded, it is stored on your computer, so the next time it is opened directly from your computer (we check if there are changes on the server and load them if needed).
- When saving, all timetable changes are instantly saved on your computer first, so that you can immediately continue your timetabling work, while changes are transferred to our server in the background.
For those with poor internet connection we offer offline timetabling, while the rest of you can enjoy online timetabling at full speed.