14.1. Understanding view states

An RIA’s UI consists of different views. Traditional websites consist of stateless, or static, pages (such as HTML pages).

Views can take on different visual appearances and representations depending on the conditions in which they’re presented. An example of a condition is a user input, such as picking an item from a drop-down list or clicking a button. Other examples include your application responding to a request sent to a server or the result of an algorithm. A simple application might have only one view with some states, whereas complex applications might have several views, each with different states.