One of the things that frustrates me often is having to try and make fat client-like functionality in a thin client. And I know I am not the only one. Instead of focusing on the business layer and other more "interesting" areas I end up spending my time making sure that a list can be sorted in a browser correctly.
But there are advantages of thin clients, including "no roll out", certain security measures build into the platform (which I pull my hair out about) and familiarity of the UI (more or less). Now I don't think that the fat client area is dead, but I don't think that web apps are going away any time soon either. I wonder if soon it will get to be more of somewhere in between. Somewhere I have not thought of before.
Since there are languages like XUL that allow the UI to be "easily" created. Will the future hold more of a hybrid where you pass some markup to the client to represent the UI and the data separate. The client will take care of doing things like displaying lists and various different widgets. I'm not talking about a fat client where the data is passed through some web service or SOAP. When you connect, if you have an outdated "UI" or don't have it already, you request that. Then you also request the data and it displays it in the UI you have on the client. This wouldn't really be too different than programming in JSP or ASP etc. where you load a collection into a tag and it iterates through it except that it is done on the client and not the server.
For applications that you would way to have more access than a web browser (freedom to print, save to the hard drive, etc.) you could have a part of the application with a permission list. Each app gets registered and uses only the parts that a user explicitly allows it to. I would think that this would be better than having users install "random" exe's on their computer.
If you have the computing part on a server, all the UI will be doing is dumb things like sorting lists, getting user input, dialog boxes, alerts, firing events etc. Any updates to the UI would get pulled in when they are on the server. It's sort of funny with desktops being so powerful yet this idea is just to use them as dumb terminals, but that's what happens with all these web apps anyways...
This "universal client" probably has tons problems that I have not thought of, but I have not seen other people talking about it. Have you? What other problems could you guys think of for this solution?
Interesting:
ReplyDeletehttp://harborjava.org/WhatIsXUL.htm
The problem I have with extending HTML, or thin clients, is that people expect basic behaviour from thin clients. Smart developers in turn exploited people's expectations for basic behaviour.
ReplyDeletePeople require very little training in order to use basic web pages, or even HTML forms or frames. With "webapps" like GMail, that turns everything on its head. All of a sudden webapps require training to use all of the features properly, and are foreign.
With a shifting change in thin-client behaviour, people are getting used to it. People are also starting to get used to custom GUIs as well, so the whole "common look and feel" argument is going out the window as a usability thing. Common look is mostly just a cosmetic thing now. People are getting used to learning new GUIs every day. Macromedia Flash can share the "blame" for that, as can skinnable applications.
What does that mean for developers? User are more flexible, which makes development more flexible. The boundaries for GUIs are being pushed in a healthy way, but we have to keep in mind there will be users left behind in the basic-HTML thin-client dark ages if they don't keep up.
my comment on fat vs thin would be that the fat people would win as they could belly bounce the thin people but the thin people could have muscle to maybe win the fight buit as fat people have more on them they would squash them an sit on thier head ! that is my view but weight doesnt matter its what they have inside
ReplyDeletepeople have killed themselves over less important issues and also see peoples opinions as more valid
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