How do I show a large data set, one page at a time?

As you saw in Chapter 6, you can add scrollbars to a table. However, if the table is truly large, you don’t want it sent to the client in its entirety. Downloading the table takes a long time, and chances are that the application user wants to see only the first few rows anyway.

The standard user interface for navigating a large table is a pager, a set of links to each page of the table, to the next and previous pages, and if there are a great number of pages, to the next and previous batch of pages. Figure 13–6 shows a pager that scrolls through a large data set—the predefined time zones, obtained by a call to java.util.TimeZone.getAvailableIDs().