On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Prince Riley wrote:
> Joost > > Reading the responses on this discussion thread, it appears the 'religious > war' you mentioned in your prior post was unavoidable. > > Not to add any fuel to the warring opinions I'd like answer a comment you > made in response to my response. > > The recent push to make web applications (not simply web browsing) perform > more like desktop applications has been the primary driver behind the Web > 2.0 and the improved Javascript engines by Google and the Mozilla people. > They have their own commercial motivations for those improvements, the > primary driver has been the software application developers who want web > apps to perform like desktop ones. > > While several traditional "desktop" application scenarios do still exists > that will likely always run directly on the O/S without a web client front > end, the direction of most major software application development efforts > I've witnessed in the past three years have all targeted migrating the > desktop GUI over to a web browser. Others in the discussion thread have > referenced several reasons for this shift already, but the trends continue > to follow the idea of pushing as much of the presentation and processing > layers onto the remote web browser. > > Finally, respectfully I must disagree with your comments that the > applications deployment approach " is only true for small > applets used by a broad public. " ignores the TOC and other economies of > scale afforded by portable web applications. Scott Trade and TD Ameritrade > are just two of several examples where sophisticated trading desk and > customer centric web-based applications are running on 100,000s of web > browsers. Just a few years ago these same applications were shipped to > clients and had to be installed and run on their desktop PCs. Well, drop by and I'll prove to you - hands down - that what our clients need simply cannot be done by web applications, because they cannot interact with the local desktop. Can your web-app burn a CD-ROM ? Does it have access to a smartcard reader ? Can it start and control MS-Word ? Can you drop files on it to send to the server ? I thought not, unless maybe you develop in Java, and then you are back in C/S... And finally: can these apps work offline with NO internet connection ? I don't think so. Web apps: by all means, but not for every possible scenario... Michael. _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
