>However, web applications lack the power of desktop apps if you are talking[color=blue]
>about a graphics-oriented >application[/color]
nope. standard servers run dual or quad cpu's at the very least. very few
desktop machines fall under that category.
[color=blue]
>or very rich UI[/color]
true.
[color=blue]
>and they lack the ease-of-use[/color]
nope. that's a design/architecture issue. very distance from a platform
issue
--
Regards,
Alvin Bruney
[Shameless Author Plug]
The Microsoft Office Web Components Black Book with .NET
available at
www.lulu.com/owc
_________________________
"Gerry Hickman" <gerry666uk@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:O4UJhr%23KFHA.1884@TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...[color=blue]
> Hi Jim,
>[color=green]
>> I agree....to a point. Web applications are definitely preferrable to
>> the installation headaches of multiple user configurations - especially
>> when looked at globally. However, web applications lack the power of
>> desktop apps if you are talking about a graphics-oriented application or
>> very rich UI and they lack the ease-of-use[/color]
>
> OK, this is very interesting. I hear this argument day and night, but I
> have to say I'm having trouble agreeing. We live in a world where office
> workers are obsessed with "the internet", even the non-technical ones! One
> minute they're on Yahoo checking email, the next they're on Google
> searching for things, suddenly they're using their "on-line banking", and
> the rest of the time they're booking cheap-ass holidays. For these users,
> the "web interface" is the most natural thing in the world. They don't
> like Flash and they don't like pop-ups. They want simple W3C compliant
> forms where they can just click a few drop downs and hit the "submit"
> button. This is exactly how I design all my web applications for my
> clients, and the users LOVE it. For them, it's just like being on a
> holiday booking site. I use super-fast cross-browser scripting to provide
> things like expand/collapse tree style navigation systems (without a
> server round trip as per .NET), use frames so that they can input to one
> pane while seeing real-time results in an other, and use things like
> client-side filtering and sorting. I use cross-browser DHTML so that
> elements can collapse and expand as the content changes. I can't think of
> any advantage to suddenly having all this converted to "Avalon" or any
> other bungling UI technology, except that it would slow the user down,
> confuse them, and cease to work on many devices.
>
> Don't believe me?
>
> Well consider this simple example. Two years ago everyone would be
> "laughing out loud" if you'd proposed a 1980s style HTML page with just
> one graphic and one text box as the UI to your world facing web-site, but
> while Microsoft were busy trying to make their enormous web graphics look
> like something from Macromedia hell, Google went ahead with the 1980s
> concept, and the rest as they say, is history! What Google proved, is that
> people can't stand Flash and graphics that take ages to download. They
> also don't like sites over-loaded with eye-candy. They also don't want to
> "take" one of Microsoft's mind-numbing "surveys". They just want to get
> straight to the information and get on with their work.
>
> Don't believe me?
>
> Well, it's strange so many people switched to Mozilla, fed up with all the
> Flash, pop-ups and ActiveX nonsense. Now they can get a clean and fast W3C
> web experience from Mozilla, and avoid the lag they get when using
> Microsoft's browser. One problem, is that IE downloads plug-ins BEFORE it
> asks you if you want the plug-in, so that kills the user experience too,
> if you don't have the plug-in it fires an error for every page thereafter
> that tries to use it. Mozilla simply ignores such things until you say you
> want it. Many sites have hidden Flash and other types of rogue content
> designed to spy on the user.
>
> With all these things added together, I just don't buy it that the "rich
> UI" is necessary for people to get their work done. I also can't agree
> that small companies somehow "need rich UIs" when big companies clearly
> don't?
>[color=green][color=darkred]
>>>>The web is unstable.
>>>
>>>Uh?? I wonder if Google and Amazon are aware of this fact?[/color][/color]
>[color=green]
>> Sure they are. That's why their UIs and applications are so simple (when
>> compared to an N-tier enterprise application).[/color]
>
> I can't agree here. Are you saying Google's indexing system and Amazon's
> order processing system are less complex or less capable than the average
> internal corporate application. Amazon's front-end is not exactly what I'd
> call simple anyway. I just don't think the fron-end and back-end of these
> systems are closely related. Google's front-end was not put there through
> lack of technical ability, but because they knew simplicity was the key to
> success.
>[color=green]
>> While Amazon can handle this down time (if it doesn;t last too long), it
>> is an entirely different matter for a sales clerk with a customer
>> standing in line at a small business to deal with. It is also far more
>> financially devistating to the small business owner to be down for a day
>> than it is for Amazon or Google.[/color]
>
> OK, but it's strange I'm not out of a job in that case? No one has ever
> complained to me about this, in fact it's the opposite - they can now use
> their apps while visiting places like Africa and China from hotel rooms,
> internet cafe's and so on - not to mention lazy-ass directors who can now
> "work from home". My work offers are flooding in, and no one has ever said
> the UI is "too basic".
>[color=green][color=darkred]
>>>I don't really have time to read blogs, but can you give us a short
>>>summary?[/color]
>>
>> No problem.....[/color]
>
> <snip very interesting stuff>
>[color=green]
>> 4) Microsoft doesn't care what's good for programmers outside
>> Microsoft or the world IT community in general. It ignores the pleadings
>> of it's customer base and can do so simply beacause it has become too
>> powerful.[/color]
>
> This is what I call "vendor tie in", and I think it will backfire. Up
> until around 2000, I had no interest in anything that wasn't Microsoft!
> The marketing was honest, the product pitch was realistic, the interop was
> good, the non-stop give-aways of tools and SDKs, excellent docs, reskits
> and KBs. I.E. had excellent W3C and ECMA implementations.
>
> Now they've thrown all that away. The recent marketing papers on
> smart-clients are misinformation at best and lies at worse. The reskits
> have gone, the good white papers deleted, the MSDN Jan2005 is broken, the
> docs have degenerated into kiddie-speak, and are now being authored in
> Word! The utter nonsense about Avalon is hard to read without vomiting.
> It's no wonder more and more people are looking elsewhere.
>[color=green][color=darkred]
>>>Security is NOT the right word to use here![/color]
>>
>> What is? I consider protecting my intelectual property security.[/color]
>
> I just think when you say "security" it implies "buffer over-runs" etc.
>[color=green]
>> Do you post the source for your entire application (all n tiers)?[/color]
>
> It would be a bit big to fit on here. There's no secrets; the back end has
> views and stored procedures, there's a transactional layer in the middle,
> then server-side web, and then client side web. Separate to this, there's
> all the change and configuration management stuff and deployment stuff -
> I've already posted most of the code for that over the last year on so, on
> groups like WMI and WSH.
>
> Thing is, the back-end/middle tier code is of no use to anyone unless they
> have the same business models, same network topology etc. Have a look at
> your own code-base, do you think it would plug straight into a different
> company without hours of work?
>
> When I go into different companies, you may think I could "steal" the
> source code and "get rich quick"?
>
> Errr, not quite. If you'd seen the bungling mess these companies systems
> are in, you'd be running screaming from the building! The _last_ thing
> you'd want to do is steal this source code, the only thing you'd want to
> do is demand an instant re-write from the ground up.
>[color=green]
>> Open source - as a model - will fail.[/color]
>
> I don't agree with this, but see next part.
>[color=green]
>> You can already see it with Linux. Linux has fragmented into so many
>> distros that software written on one distro (especially if it takes
>> advantage of hooks or APIs built into that distro) will not run on many
>> others.[/color]
>
> Yup, I certainly agree with this! Fragmentation!
>
> There are some major problems with open source and free apps, but I don't
> think it will "fail" outright. Look at PERL and CPAN for example. That's
> been around for years, the categorization is clear, and it certainly
> hasn't "failed". What about BSD Unix, surely you are not saying it's
> "failed". Isn't that what Microsoft had to use when Hotmail fell over on
> Windows?
>
> I'm actually thinking of moving all my web apps and database back ends to
> UNIX. I could get something like Sun 4 way UltraSPARC III servers with
> fibre SANs, the new superfast TCP/IP stack, and get true 64 bit 4 way
> processing of things like XML parsing and full-text indexing. Couple that
> to CORBA middle-ware and some Apache modules and WHOA! Compare that to
> what you can do with bloated Windows 2003 server where they're more
> worried about the "XP look and feel" than the interface for the fibre and
> SAN.
>
> Hmmmm, food for thought.
>
> --
> Gerry Hickman (London UK)[/color]
