Previously, in The Architecture of Open Source Applications, I described SocialCalc, an in-browser spreadsheet system that replaced the server-centric WikiCalc architecture. SocialCalc performs all of its computations in the browser; it uses the server only for loading and saving spreadsheets.
For the Socialtext team, performance was the primary goal behind SocialCalc's design in 2006. The key observation was this: Client-side computation in JavaScript, while an order of magnitude slower than server-side computation in Perl, was still much faster than the network latency incurred during AJAX roundtrips:
