I find myself having "user behavior" issues relating to the mobile portion of my web app. Aside from certain phone browsers not being able to handle AJAX (older Palms, mostly), there is a significant delay between a button being pressed and the related field being updated - in spite of very lightweight data (timestamps, mostly). This leads to users wanting to press the buttons repeatedly, which simply queues up more AJAX requests rather than speeding up the update process. Note: I do pop a message into the field that says "Updating..." but apparently users don't trust that the message will ever go away.
Everything I've read online says to steer clear of synchronous AJAX but I'm hard pressed to find another solution to this problem. Is this a case where synchronous AJAX is the best answer, or is there another client-side solution to prevent users from pressing more buttons while the AJAX script is running?
Should I just disable/enable the buttons in the AJAX script? I'm a little leary of adding overhead to the client since most mobile phones aren't high on processing power. What's the best solution here?
