ABILITY TO BROWSE AND RANDOMLY ACCESS A LARGE HIERARCHY IN NEAR CONSTANT TIME IN A STATELESS APPLICATION

摘要

A browser is disclosed that provides for browsing a hierarchical dataset including potentially millions of nodes. The hierarchical dataset may be located on a machine that is remote to the machine hosting the browser. Through selective, intelligent fetching and local cache management of sparse portions of the hierarchical dataset, the browser provides consistent and predictable response times for displaying a randomly-selected node in the context of proximate nodes in the hierarchy.