The Case Against Web Apps 431
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister offers five reasons why companies should re-consider concentrating their development efforts on browser-based apps. As McAllister sees it, Web apps encourage a thin-client approach to development that concentrates far too much workload in the datacenter. And while UI and tool limitations are well known, the Web as 'hostile territory' for independent developers is a possibility not yet fully understood. Sure, Web development is fast, versatile, and relatively inexpensive, but long term, the browser's weaknesses might just outweigh its strengths as an app delivery platform."
No Shit. (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact that the different browsers render basic sites differently should be warning enough. Add to that different versions etc; You will never have a standardised audience to utilise these. It will always be lowest common denominator.
Decentralization? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought decentralization was supposed to be a good thing, the whole motivation behind having personal computers to begin with but, in the age of web apps everywhere, we seem to be returning to the days of the totalitarian, you'll-do-it-our-way-and-like-it data center (mainframe) model.
SQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
in this modern day-and-age, most stuff is just data anyways, and that is all database. Moving to a true client architecture, oh wait, all the data is still stored centrally, and most reports are all done via stored procedures.
Even with true clients, much data processing is still done in the datacenter. maybe some advanced analysis is done on other machines with a data dump, but still... it's all data
Bring back a document-only based web! (Score:1, Insightful)
The web used to be hyperlinked documents, but has since turned into a spaghetti of an application hell-bent on delivering ads, peeping into your web browsing habits, and trying to infect your computer with viruses.
Bring back the document-based web! Bring back content! Bring back control to your computer! Say no to webpages that insist on running code on your computer.
Re:No Shit. (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact that the different browsers render basic sites differently should be warning enough.
Nonsense. Unless you're using bleeding edge UI widgets, a browser UI is quite easy to replicate accross browsers with the use of targeted CSS or simply thoughtful design. Even with a JS framework for your UI elements, browser diferences are simply not a huge consideration. Unless you want that ActiveX goodness...
True, but people will not listen (Score:5, Insightful)
While I think the arguments against web-apps are valid, it is the newest trend and people will not listen. It will require a few very expensive catastrophies, before something happens. And then people will still not undterstand what the problem is, just that there were expensive catastrophies.
By now I believe most technological trends are not rational.
Re:No Shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that the different browsers render basic sites differently should be warning enough.
Why would switching to a native app help you here? If the user can't be persuaded to install a compatible web browser, what makes you think that they will install a standalone application?
Automation/Integration (Score:4, Insightful)
To my mind the biggest weakness of web apps is that you have a hard time doing any sort of schedualed reporting/exports to use in another application. It can be done, but you really have to have the stars line up just right, or use some 3rd party scripting of some sort. Doable, but painful. God forbid you want to share data between two web apps, especially when company A and company B both have it in their heads that the other should pay them for development assistance.
Keyboard shortcuts and CLI (Score:5, Insightful)
While fat client apps can have messed up tab stops, they're generally better than their web-based counterparts. A CLI is even better allowing for things to be done in bulk/batch.
I've got over 100 buttons right at my finger tips. I shouldn't need 2 more that roll around (FPS mouselook not withstanding). Let me ALT+whatever and TAB my way around.
YMMV.
Mobility is the factor (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now web apps are king because they're always only the nearest computer away, and work on almost everything.
We're getting close to devices that provide the same functionality in a mobile form factor. Once everyone has an iphone like device that has a standard development environment we'll likely see a resurgence of local apps. But that's probably a years away at best.
Right now, you can either develop for the web, which will work everywhere, or write one app in Win32/.Net, one in Objective C for Mac, one in Java with Blackberry specific apis, one in Objective C for iPhone, one in [whatever palm is up to], one in .net for winmobile, etc, etc etc.
The only reason client side apps were ever written was because you could be fairly sure windows was your target, or it simply wasn't feasible to centralize and so you forced a standard environment.
There's no single platform anymore, and probably won't be for a while (and when it comes it'll look a lot like a web browser), so the only viable option is web based.
Does it suck? Yes and no. It's definitely better than debugging an app on 40 different platform/cpu/os version combinations.
Just come right out and say it, Neil. (Score:3, Insightful)
Enterprise applications should run on dedicated, fully optimized hardware that can be bolted to employees faces.
As far as a web browser for every employee, there are organizations that "value" productivity and organizations that actually understand how to maximize it.
Mixed response (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Decentralization? (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember "Push" technology or whatever that damn buzzword was back in '97? This is just another iteration.
Now, not to say Web apps don't have a future. Being able to whip up a decent document, spreadsheet or presentation on the fly with nothing but an internet connection will be damn handy. But as a replacement for self-control? No frigging way.
Tossing a bone to the fanboys: This is all Microsoft's fault anyway. If they hadn't decided to use Office as a raping and pillaging tool, there wouldn't be such a goddamn stampede away from them, and towards any cheaper alternative, whether it's good for you or not.
Meanwhile, I'm happily using O.o and laughing at all of them.
Re:Decentralization? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought decentralization was supposed to be a good thing
It has its good and bad points, like most things in life.
the whole motivation behind having personal computers to begin with
The original motivation was geeks playing around. The main reason they originally started showing up in businesses was VisiCalc, which simply wasn't available in any other form except chalk boards.
we seem to be returning to the days of the totalitarian, you'll-do-it-our-way-and-like-it data center (mainframe) model.
Except we aren't. Even a netbook is smarter than a TTY terminal. Plus, with the internet you aren't tied to a single mainframe. You can do your web email with Google, your web search with Yahoo, and your web word processing with Microsoft. The old mainframe way would be if Comcast supplied email, search, and document creation and you did not have a choice to go out and use other providers' services instead.
What you are seeing is a move towards web apps where it makes sense (email, document sharing, social networking, etc.), and people sticking with local applications where it doesn't make sense to go to the web (video or photo editing, most office documents, etc.) - anything where the bandwidth or latency requirements become too much of a bottleneck.
Re:No Shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
But we can use Crystal Reports or Oracle Forms!!! Then we can install 1 Gig of software to be our "server" (in addition to the DB) and another Gig of software on the client... all to look at the SQL queries sitting on the DB server!
But wait there's more!
In most companies BIG IT supports databases and data centers. little it supports servers with department apps. It's all about the responsibility. An app that hogs a desktop PC and takes 5 minutes to start is the "users" or "it" problem, not management's. The same app in a datacenter serving 50 users poorly is now an "IT" manager problem.. and they'll demand the app fixed or toss the app out. Guess which group vendors like to sell to?
not much of an argument (Score:3, Insightful)
But I thought the web was good?
WRONG! The web is bad! Well, sometimes, for some things... maybe.
There's a grab-bag of random thoughts there on some things that could be inherent problems in the web and some that are merely artifacts, and it seems neither here nor there.
The big guys always call the shots - who cares if it's browsers or operating systems, you're not going to tell MS (or Apple, just to be fair) what to do and there's no guarantee the next SP or random security patch won't bone all your effort with no notice or recourse, whether it's in-browser or on the desktop.
And the web UIs are a mess? That's nothing to do with the web - lots of people design lots of stuff, you get randomness. It's no different than on the desktop, except the long reign of some MS products and the fact that developing Windows apps you get to use some of those same form controls gets you the appearance of this magical consistency that's really just the consequence of monoculture. Open any full-screen app (read: game) and it's a brave new world, like on the web, because the pre-generated MS controls and constraints don't apply. But this is good, right, because you're not doing what the man tells you to do?
And the productivity argument... did he just need to reach 5? You can block the outside world coming in over the wire, it's not that big an effort, and then people will find other ways to screw around - hand-held devices are so powerful now the whole issue of limiting the desktop to work issues only is quickly becoming moot.
And so on and so forth... I guess it's redundant to say "you need to consider each usage case based on its specific merits," but then the decision-makers don't...
Re:No Shit. (Score:3, Insightful)
Please read the fine article, if you don't mind.
Author is specifically referring to enterprise client/server apps. That some dweebs, a few years ago, decided that web front-ends for such apps would be a "good thing" is tragic. Stand-alone, platform-specific front-end applications are infinitely superior in such an environment.
I've been waiting for someone to write this article for years. 5 Stars.
Re:SQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what kind of work you do, but as someone who is developing a lot of web apps right now, I'll say straight up that the data is the easy part. The internals of any system are well understood and the border cases are easy to handle.
What takes time, and what breaks, and what drives me nuts, is the UI - validation, layout, rendering quirks, etc., etc., etc.
I've recently started playing around with Adobe's Webkit-based AIR framework for this reason. It lets me interact with the local file-system, have a data store that's not reliant on a network, and above all, has a consistent UI environment.
"It's just data" is a data-centric way of looking at things, and is true in a sense. But the argument being made here is about the interface between the client and the data - not the data itself.
Re:No Shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not at all. There are are all sorts of very standard issues which render differently with AJAX based apps. Why do you think even the largest web app vendors like google and yahoo support certain features on say IE and firefox and not on Safari?
Re:No Shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
As one of those dweebs the reasons were simple. Cost of deployment. If you have a large potential user base with few actual repeat users (which is a very large group of apps) deployment costs per user can be intense.
For example take 1m potential users and 200 daily (or weekly) users with 50 of them ever repeating within any given year. Do you deploy a million or do 150 deploys per day to essentially random desktops?
Java applets for serious web apps (Score:1, Insightful)
The right answer might be Java (yes applets) (for web applications). Too many online apps suffer from GUI design flaws/look and feel etc, because it web site (touch feely girly developers & marketing driods) have far too input. Applets if done right with webservices for backend data comms would work well and be consistent (consistent as the code monkey wants to make it).
Ahhhhhhh pontificating (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that many desktop apps hit web services or communicate via HTTP now, mostly because it's 1. easy and 2. SOA became the flavor of the month about a year or so ago.
Also, many enterprise web apps, at least that I've used, have some sort of plugin/JVM requirement. Are they a desktop app? Web app? Some awesomely funky in-between?
Personally, I think these "thick vs. thin" client discussions are a nice waste of time and excuse to get page impressions.
Let's deconstruct, shall we?
Running Outlook and Office will immediately slow that poor laptop to molasses. Add a nice shiny .NET app, or worse, Java, and you've got yourself a tarpit.
You, my friend, have never used internally developed VB6 apps. I say no more.
For some applications, I completely agree. But not everybody needs to see dynamic fluid modeling or stock quotes for 3000 securities in a real-time heatmap.
Good call, time to turn to Java and .NET, which aren't controlled by big vendors.
Because deploying and maintaining desktop apps across thousands of machines is wicked easy.
Re:Decentralization? (Score:3, Insightful)
It has the name "Photoshop" in it, but it sure ain't Photoshop... it doesn't even have layers. I think you'll see some movement of amateur photo editing move to the web, but certainly not everyone just yet.
Re:True, but people will not listen (Score:3, Insightful)
Hear hear !
Technological evangelical bandwagons. All aboard.
One size fits all is another problem. Silver bullet for sale over here, will work for all applications big and small, and solve all your problems.
Honest, guv.
Re:No Shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see why my comment doesn't apply? I know I went off on a bit of a tangent, but...
I think people are forgetting what a PITA it was with installed apps. Obscure bugs, difficulty in making sure everyone had the latest version, locked-down desktops that required IT to install the app, off-site users being SOL, platform dependency, etc. And, the BIG one, everyone in the company thought they were a VB wizard, so you had a bunch of crazy VB and VBA apps floating around without any real central control. At least with web apps you know everyone is running the same version and using the same settings, and there's some accountability for who's in charge of the thing because SOMEONE has to run the server :)
Re:Bring back a document-only based web! (Score:5, Insightful)
1997 called... (Score:3, Insightful)
It wants its irrational fear of the web back.
Web apps are not new. We have seen numerous expensive catastrophes. And the trend is not reversing.
Hell we keep pushing more and more in the direction of SOA and chubby clients (thicker than thin, but thinner than thick).
-Rick
Re:No Shit. (Score:3, Insightful)
Citing all those listed PITA's in the parent post, I much prefer using web applications in my line of work because they're the best tool for the specific job at hand.
Re:No Shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
While that may sound good in theory, I have yet to see in practice where any web-fronted application had shown any lower deployment/administration/maintenance costs than a comparable desktop app. What may be saved in deployment (and many good enterprise desktop apps manage deployment nearly as transparently as a web app) seems to get eaten up by slow response and flakiness for users, network issues, web server issues, browser issues, and security issues. Admittedly, in many cases this is a matter of badly designed web apps, but in the world of commercial enterprise software, the quality of browser-based apps seems to be worse than the already pretty dismal quality of enterprise desktop apps.
Browser apps certainly have their place and can be the superior choice in the situations for which they are well-suited, but after the last decade of having way too many utterly painful browser apps forced upon me, I think the reasoning that led so many to the Kool-Aid tub needs to be reassessed.
Point by point dissection (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a software support rep and not even a developer and I know this is a blowhard troll.
1. It's client-server all over again.
Web applications encourage a thin-client approach: the client handles UI rendering and user input, while the real processing happens on servers. What sense does that make when any modern laptop packs enough CPU and GPU power to put yesterday's Cray supercomputer to shame?
Concentrating computing power in the datacenter is fine if you're a Google or a Microsoft, but that approach puts a lot of pressure on smaller players. Scaling small server farms to meet demand can be a real challenge -- just ask Twitter.
Furthermore, security vulnerabilities abound in networked applications, and the complexity of the browser itself seemingly makes bugs inevitable. Why saddle your apps with that much baggage?
First, it's not client server all over again, not in the way you mean it. Client/server like windows terminal server or citrix makes it easier to manage company wide systems by giving an IT guy a central point to manage, and that saves time, which translates to dollars. Web apps do the same thing, but they are benefit from even easier setup management and deployment. Terminal server is a pain in the ass when it comes to deploying an app, because it has several ways to do so, none of them web based. You could deploy it by giving everyone a desktop to the terminal server, but then the dumbass users can't figure out which is their PC desktop and which is their server desktop. You could publish the app, which requires changing settings on the server and deploying the proper shortcut to the user's desktop, which takes more knowledge, which not everyone has.
Web apps are easier to deploy in that all you have to do is provide a web address. Everyone knows how to use a web browser and click on links. Citrix even recognized this and provides software to allow you to connect to the citrix box with a web interface!
Siting a laptop is stronger than an old cray is a clever misdirection. The real question is, what's more beneficial for your business, 30 laptops that cost $1000 apiece? Or 1 very large server that costs $10,000 plus 30 laptops costing $500 apiece? I just saved you $5000 on hardware! Plus when a laptop dies, there's less downtime, because I could just hand you another machine and you just go to the web address again. No application reinstalls. Most mega servers these days cost less than a distributed environment and can handle processing quite nicely.
As far as network vulnerabilities, that's just utterly nonsensical. How does that statement say that a webapp is less vulnerable than a distributed app? Data still has to travel over a network in a distributed app! Duh! Besides, most of the vulnerabilities these days dealt with IE specifically and those dealt with how it was integrated with Windows. Pick another web browser, viola, reduced vulnerabilities. Take it a step further and deploy the web app as an intranet app so it can't be accessed outside your local subnet. Network security is for the network professionals, let them take care of it. Provide encryption as needed in the app and access levels for the data but other than that, that's not a developer's domain.
2. Web UIs are a mess.
The Web's stateless, mainly forms-based UI approach is reliable, but it's not necessarily the right model for every application. Why sacrifice the full range of real-time interactivity offered by traditional, OS-based apps? Technologies such as AJAX only simulate in the browser what systems programming could do already.
And while systems programmers are accustomed to building apps with consistent UI toolkits such as the Windows APIs, Apple's Cocoa, or Nokia's Qt, building a Web UI is too often an exercise in reinventing the wheel. Buttons, controls, and widgets vary from app to app. Sometimes the menus are along the top, other times they're off to the side. Sometimes they pop down when you roll over them, and s
False Dichotomy (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe web-versus-desktop is mostly a false dichotomy. The problem is that our standards need a rethink. Web browsers started as a kind of e-brochure viewers, and this e-brochure approach was shoehorned into C.R.U.D. uses (biz forms, data-sheets, and reports).
What is really needed is a "GUI browser" standard and/or OSS tool that has most of the desktop-like GUI functionality and behavior we've all grown to like. BUT, this "GUI browser" could ALSO be used for desktop development. Thus, one does not have to learn a different UI platform when toggling between desktop and web projects.
Most GUI kits have made this difficult by making GUI's language-specific. Fitting these to other languages is often almost as forced as HTML-browser-to-CRUD shoehorn jobs. What needs to be done is the design of a GUI protocol that is mostly declarative. Being mostly declarative makes it easier to use by different languages and paradigms. In my opinion, the "everything must be OOP" thinking is largely what has got us stuck with language-specific kits. OOP is not well-suited to declarative APIs/protocols in my opinion. Encapsulation generally leads to behavior-centric API/protocol designs. (Some disagree, it makes for an interesting and heated debate.)
The behavior-centric approaches of existing GUI kits hinders this goal. Most common GUI actions can be defined declaratively if you think about it a bit. The remaining that require Turing-Complete coding can be done by server-side and/or client-side app languages using the more lower-level features of the GUI-browser.
Think of it as kind of as a smarter and HTTP-friendly rework of X-Windows where one usually deals at the widget-level instead of at key-stroke level (but key-stroke level is still possible as an option).
Re:No Shit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well you have two issues here.
1) Web apps are worse. Yes you are right they are. You take a definite hit on quality. The hope is that it doesn't matter too much.
2) Web apps are harder to deploy. That is simply false. Getting an app deployed in an enterprise can be tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Getting it deployed in a half dozen + home systems + laptops can be a million easy. I can easily pay for a few help desk people to work through the remaining issues with networking.
Re:No Sh!t. (Score:3, Insightful)
I second this.
What about all those fine thick client apps that refuse to run unless they have elevated privileges on the workstation?
Re:Why is it worth their time? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they shouldn't have to spend much time -- design it properly, and it should just work on any browser that does a good job with standard HTML.
And because if you do test on all browsers, you'll end up with a more robust app -- not just against those versions, but against future versions. For example, if you only developed for Firefox and IE, you might easily be relying on a bug common to Firefox and IE.
Centralized Control of Standalone Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're going to see an explosion of standalone applications tethered to a web-based datasource or back-end. iPhone and Android basically do this already - taking their cue from email programs since the dawn of the internet. Programs like Steam allow you to install local, fat clients through a thin client interface. Each of those pieces has a reason for being fat or thin, and you want to take advantage of that.
I think, in the end, the point is that you want to be confident your interface is usable where-ever, and that your backend can be swapped up without version issues, and that either way the program can do everything it needs to. The web is very good at the first two, it's just that the domain of problems it can manage has not yet expanded to the third. Is that anything but a matter of time?
Re:No Shit. (Score:4, Insightful)
seems to get eaten up by slow response and flakiness for users, network issues, web server issues, browser issues, and security issues.
All of which are every bit as problematic for standalone apps -- except browser issues, and you can always mandate that everyone install Firefox.
the quality of browser-based apps seems to be worse than the already pretty dismal quality of enterprise desktop apps.
Meh. Correlation, causation, etc...
I'll argue that it's still possible to build a good browser-based app on a similar budget as a good desktop app. On top of which, you get portability, the back button / a tabbed UI, easier maintainability (patch everyone at once), and thin-client goodness (your computer's down? Borrow a friend's), all pretty much for free.
The only technical advantages of a desktop app are performance (browser-based CAD is pretty primitive) and the ability to work offline. The former isn't usually needed -- premature optimization is the root of all evil, and unless you're really talking about CAD, the browser should be fast enough. And the latter is neatly solved with Google Gears, or possibly Adobe Air.
Re:Why is it worth their time? (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing is, most browsers display stuff differently because they're not adhering to a common standard. There is less reason for me to develop for IE if they're going to belligerently never fix a compatibility issue with their browser.
But, on the other hand, most browsers are moving to a common standard. Ultimately speaking, needing to cross-platform a webapp is going to be eliminated - or all but. Robustness is a useful quality, but spending time on something now that is going to not be an issue in the future is not a useful pursuit. In most cases, designing for these compatibility issues falls into that category.
In short; you easily could be relying on a common bug, but you just as easily might not be. There is no reason to second guess yourself for such a small return.
Re:Response from L4C list (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite a bit, actually. First and foremost is the convenience of application access. There is no software to install and you can use your applications anywhere you have access to a web browser. In addition, the rise of web applications has spurred the rise of web services. Web services share out tremendous amounts of public information allowing developers to "mashup" (I hate that term) data sources to produce superior applications. Compare that to the desktop where just getting the programs on your system to cooperate is a challenge! (To say nothing of networking.)
When software installation is so easy, and one's package manager downloads stuff using http, there is no real advantage in this case. Instead of searching on google, and going to a website, you search in pacman or yum or apt or synaptic and click on a "page" to load. As a bonus feature, it's much faster next time.
I personally have written an application for my current employer that requires the client to dynamically sort a 100,000 record data set in nothing but client-side Javascript. Significant computer science had to go into creating an optimized, multi-threaded algorithm that would perform well on the lowest common denominator. (IE6) The next generation of browsers that are appearing (Chrome, Firefox 3.1, Opera 10, Safari 4) will have so much compute power that a problem like my 100,000 row sorter will become easy and commonplace. Furthermore, the standards are even adding true background threads to support long-running compute operations. (The standard is based on the Google Gears implementation, which is already available.)
Do you not find it alarming that in this day and age, a program to sord 100,000 records is deemed impressive? On my machine (an eee 900):
time awk 'BEGIN{for(;;)print rand()}' | head -100000 | sort > /dev/null
Takes 0.7 seconds. By removing the stringification, and obvious inefficiencies,it would run much faster. In C++ is is easy to sort hundreds of millions of records in a very short amount of time using nothing more than std::sort and a suitable comparison function. The fact that in this area it is deemed impressive (and I have little doubt that it is) is a testament to a large step backwards.
Your other points stand, though.
Re:No Shit. (Score:3, Insightful)
... and stuff like wxWidgets [wxwidgets.org], too. Multiple languages, multiple platforms, looks and acts like the running environment. No VM required. (Yes, I know, gcj exists ...)
Re:... and so what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure a lot of apps can be moved to a web interface. A lot of carpentry can also be done with a hacksaw. The question isn't "Can it be done?" but rather "Is this the best tool for the job?". For example I strongly believe a web app is an awful idea for an office suite. (Having non-sensitive documents stored and editable on the web may be a good idea depending on the application, but there's nothing wrong with using a standard format and using the appropriate document editor. Sure a web interface would give you consistent editing but the requirement that you're online and the speed at which a web app will work are a bigger disadvantage.)
Personally I don't find any of Joel's ramblings interesting anymore. He has a very skewed view. Some of what he says is just plain wrong. (He completely lost me when he posted about Bill Gates' arrogant behaviour in a hero worshipping tone. If you can't even recognise unprofessional behaviour when you see it your professional opinion means very little to me).
Re:Keyboard shortcuts and CLI (Score:3, Insightful)
Keyboard shortcuts can be done in web apps, but too many of my fellow web developers are too lazy to bother implementing them. As a keyboard fan, it drives me nuts.
However, if the truth be told, that was a problem back when I was developing client/server GUI apps as well. I always seemed to be the only guy who put the effort into ensuring the UI was keyboard navigable.
In enterprise software development, the UI always seems to be almost an after-thought. I don't think bailing on web apps will solve that problem.
Re:Decentralization? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have yet to meet anybody that said their new web-based app whipped the llama's azz compared to the old thin-client or mainframe app
Unsurprising. Even with AJAX techniques to avoid refreshing the page fully, and even using JSON (maybe gzip'ed) instead of XML to reduce the traffic, and even with HTTP keep-alive to reduce the connection times, the technology used in web-apps today is still more "expensive" in terms of performance/latency than the older client/server methods. You build a 2-tier Win32 client with a direct connection to the database, and you've got a pure binary stream, composed of useful data and little else (vs. verbose XML, particularly); you don't have extra layers of webservers, you don't have a connection that starts/stops constantly, etc. You have the ability for the server to notify the client that something has changed, whereas with web-apps, you at best have something like Comet, and more likely have some sort of polling AJAX call. And the client's probably compiled, running natively, using hWnd's and whatnot; with web-apps, you may have the wonder that is javascript performing DOM updates that have to be interpreted and re-rendered by a multipurpose browser.
Of course it's less efficient. But as others have pointed out, that's not always the point. It's about control, it's about standardization, and ... oh, right, it's about control.
Tiresome (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, that was the lamest collection of reasons I've ever seen.
It's client-server all over again? Umm. Yeah? So? Most enterprise applications are client-server. Include document and process management and your entire network is a gigantic client-server system. Come on. Is that supposed to scare anyone? Really? Wow. Should every employee have a browser? Hell yeah. If they have a computer they should have a browser. If you have a problem with your employees doing other stuff than work then you have a problem that won't go away because you take away the browser. That should be obvious to anyone who has ever been an employer.
And saying that the web is a place that is dominated by big players is just ludicrous when advocating working on the desktop instead. (I don't think I need to spell this one out for you)
No, this is all crap. There are valid reasons why certain applications shouldn't be web based. But the article lists none of these. Too much load on the datacenter. I mean seriously. Come on!
Re:No Shit. (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, on the (admittedly few) occasions I have used a Mac, logging into GMail via Safari has always led me to the "basic HTML" version of the site. Turning off the browser check caused GMail to not render at all. So, I don't know what kind of JavaScript/CSS GMail uses, but everything works fine on Internet Explorer and Firefox but is broken on Safari, Konqueror and Opera.
Re:No Shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience what happens is the opposite problem:
1. Corporate IT department decrees that all machines will only run WIndows, and will only use Internet Explorer, because that way there is only one client version to target.
2. Corporate IT develops (or buys from a vendor) a web based application. It becomes widely deployed.
Needless to say, said web application only works with IE. Why should it work with anything else? See item #1.
3. A new version of IE comes out. The widely deployed app won't operate with it, because it was designed to be dependent on ActiveX, and it is incompatible with IE version what-ever-we-have +1.
4. So, corporate IT decrees that no one using this application can upgrade IE until the app has been fixed and tested.
Which is why we are still using IE 6.
Now the interesting question is, what happens when we need to use two web apps, each of which has different (and mutually exclusive) browser version requirements?
The ironic thing is that if in step #1 they had said we can use any browser, on any O/S, then we wouldn't be in this mess, because the web apps wouldn't be browser version specific.
Re:Ahhhhhhh pontificating (Score:3, Insightful)
I've used many Java apps over many years (all "enterprise" apps) and they were all *amazingly* slow, every one. SOme are just slow enough that you notice, others take 5 seconds after clicking on each control to react. People often say this it doesn't have to be this way in Java, and maybe that's true, but nevertheless every single Java "enterprise" app I've every seen across many years and companies has been utter crap.
Also, none of them used Windows widgets on my Windows machine, so each UI was a puzzle to be solved anew.
Re:True, but people will not listen (Score:4, Insightful)
I hear what's being said but here's a scenario where anything other than a web delivered app is murder:
- We are a small company 300,000 people in some cases
- *All* of their employees use us exactly *once* a year.
Imagine trying to install a desktop client across all continents (save for Antarctica), every year, for one use. (we do have feature upgrades that would call for redeployment).
How much leverage would we have to get that done? in time? none.
Web based? no problem. We get 5-10 calls for support. No additional deployment is needed since all their computers have browsers and access is controlled centrally by them.
Like most things in life, there is good and bad with web delivered app. Is it *the* solution in some cases? Absolutely? Is the *the* solution in *all* cases? Absolutely not. Figuring out when to use what is what the gray thing between the ears is for.
Re:... and so what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Computers aren't like physical objects--they're vastly more configurable. Most users seem to value convenience and ease-of-use above all other attributes, and the way they've embraced webmail shows it. I'm not one of them, but that's the way users are going. Their definition of "best" is different than your definition of best.
Email is inherently suited to being a web based application. For a start retrieving and sending messages requires an Internet connection. Secondly, most email messages are just text and don't require fancy controls. (Where you need rich text, controls are still easily accomodated. Wher eyou need more, you use attachments for which funcitonality is also easily provided in a web app).
It doesn't matter how configurable a computer is. Web applications have limitations that desktop applications do not have (and to a lesser extent the opposite is also true). It really is a question of using the right tool for the job.
Sure, browsers suck, but what options do we have? (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate crappy AJAX GUIs as much as everyone else, but I also know that writing a decent "offline" application in a suitable language takes at least one order of magnitude more effort - and that is before you attempt to implement some of the features every web app has naturally (automatic updating etc.).
It's convenient to rant about the stuff we use every day, but when was the last time *you* wrote and supported a non-web based, cross-platform application with GUI and had first hand experience with all the problems involved? Nowdays we're all spoilt web developers, aren't we ...
Re:No Shit. (Score:3, Insightful)
You've clearly never used SAP.
Re:No Shit. (Score:3, Insightful)
I can add a few more:
And there are probably many more. For the most part, technologies aren't just chosen on whims but for business reasons (though 'it's what we have expertise in' can be a compelling reason)
Re:No Shit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Will your JAR package run on my iPhone? No? Because any decently-written web app out there will. Slowly, mind you, but it runs nonetheless.
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And that's the idiot devs at Apple, for spurning the HUGE market of J2ME for platform control.
It's the number one reason I'm not buying another phone without great J2ME support. I have applications I just won't do on the web - web applications are useless, for example, when your not in a 3G area, and trust me, that's more common still in America than you probably realize.