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Development Shifting From Web Applications Back To Rich Clients

posted by Editor on Wednesday September 25, @03:05PM

This article on ComputerWorld points out that the emergence of development frameworks which are optimized for desktop functions, such as Microsoft .NET, are prompting developers to re-evaluate their methods for designing client applications. After years of focusing on Web-based applications, in which all functions reside on the server and are exposed to users entirely within the browser, interface developers are now hitting the limits of HTML for designing rich GUIs. The Web application approach also lost the highly graphical user interfaces and intensive data entry and calculation capabilities that many users had grown to expect. Microsoft .NET is allowing functions to be kept on the client with its ability to run old and new application components side by side, so that old applications won't break when new applications or application components are installed.

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My experience (Score:1)

by Androse Rosewood (auguste at mac dot com) on Tuesday October 08, @06:04AM EST (#1)
(User #101 Info)

the emergence of development frameworks which are optimized for desktop functions, such as Microsoft .NET, are prompting developers to re-evaluate their methods for designing client applications

I'm not shure that it's the development of the frameworks that initiated the movement, it's more like the other way round. Personnally I've been expacting such a framework for years.

I have not tried .NET, and do not plan to use it (it's a religion thing, don't ask). I have tried :

Flash, 5 and 6. Pretty nice, but lacks interoperability with free middleware like PHP (for 'remoting' for ex.), and the way the player handles text is pretty weak, plus you can't use your mouse scroll on flash scrollbar, etc.
RealBasic (Mac and Windows only), because it's very easy and fast to build a functional OS-native interface. The problem is that it's too low-level for most web-apps : I spent half the developpement time handling http sockets and XML parsing, which should be 'embeded' in an ideal framework.
XUL. I'm just getting into XUL, it looks promising. From my point of view it's only a very strict type of DHTML with more widgets and no cross-browser hassles. Having the client to install Mozilla can be a problem.
Java. Has been doing this for years with Swing. The problem is that it's just way too low-level for most small web-apps. I'm not going to learn Java just to have a crossplatform client UI. Too much work.

What do you use ? What have you tried out ?

I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth. -- Fry