title: Server-side vs. Client-side (AJAX) Loading
body: <p>I was wondering what is considered best practice. Let's say I have a dropdown select widget. Should it be preloaded with content when the page is served up from the server or once it is loaded, should an AJAX request be made to retrieve the contents and then populate it?</p>
  
  <p>I kinda like the idea of loading it empty and issuing an AJAX call to retrieve the contents. But is that going to result in slower page loading times. Especially if the page has several widgets that need to be loaded with content from the server?</p>
  
  <p>Does it matter on the amount of content being loaded?</p>
  
  <p>For the dropdown example, I meant the options in the dropdown. So if I had a dropdown of employees to choose, from I am referring to that list of employees. Do I load an empty dropdown and on init of the controller have it retrieve the employees and populate the dropdown?</p>
  
  <p>But then I think about a datagrid of let's say 200 rows of emplyees and some employee data that is stored in a database. Do I load the page and when the page loads have a controller whose init function retrieves the dataset of employees and populates and displays the datagrid?</p>
  
  <p>Or when the page is served up from the server does it retrieve the dataset on the server-side where it also creates the datagrid and it gets loaded then.
  This is the programming world that I am used to having done mostly PHP, JSP and ASP stuff in the past. Only using JavaScript for some cool page effects, etc.</p>
  
  <p>But I seem to like the idea of once the page is loaded (or being loaded), make AJAX requests to retrieve the data needed to populate the widgets/content on the current screen. I am just concerned that the loading of page might seem clunky or slow since I am now making more requests to the server to paint the page. The initial request for the page, and then a request for each dataset needed to populate a widget.</p>