Todd W. wrote:
"Paul Kraus" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<snip />
Am I able to write a network app say on one of my Linux servers? Then
provide a gui that would run on the w32 workstations? Do I have to
install perl / tk on all of the workstations to do this?
Sure you can, if you like maintenance and upgrade headaches. The problems
involved in doing what you propose are why web apps were invented.
If you are going to write a desktop GUI that is nothing more than a thin
client that connects to the application server, you will be writing a
program called a web browser. You'll not only be reinventing the wheel,
you'll be reinventing the internet. Good luck.
Todd W.
C'mon, you're making sound worse than it is. You can install Hummingbird Exceed or Cygwin on the Windows boxes. You don't need perl/TK everywhere. As far as "reinventing the internet" goes, it depends on what you want to do. Re my earlier post: the statelessness of the web. Are there going to be multiple hits from the same individual that can be interpreted as a session? To put it another way, tk VS web page is like a dialog over the telephone VS two people who can't connect with each other but leave and respond to timestamped messages on each other's answering machines. It boils down to, how complicated is the interaction and how much context needs to be inferred?
I think that the reason the Web/HTML paradigm is dominant is an accident
of history, basically. It could have been X. I think the designers of X
intended it to be what the web is now. However, in the eighties and
early nineties, a box capable of running an X server was an expensive
proposition. It just barely ran on a 33 Meg 486 if you didn't really
want to do anything else except run Xroach. You could browse the web on
a 386 SX (remember those?). Plus, if you were a C programmer, it was
horrible to code the stuff, the principle here was the X let you do
anything you want at the price of having to worry about everything. Very
expensive, pun. Good abstractions like tk weren't really invented and
debugged until the web was already there.
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