Your experience is biased by your rejection of the Web model.
If HTML/CSS was so 'inconsistent' across browsers, frameworks like
Bootstrap would be impossible. Bootstrap works perfectly, not only for
what you call 'general public' web pages, also for business application,
internal or not; on any browser and any device; and is customizable.
If users preferred desktop applications, as you seem to argue, the
web-based Salesforce would not have forced the fastest growing company
of the 90's -- Siebel systems -- to a quasi bankruptcy in the early
2000's, pushing them to be bought by Oracle.
I'll give you another example from ACTUAL experience: with FoxInCloud we
can have the very same application, running the very same code against
the very same data, on the desktop and/or in the browser. One of our
clients, US based, has such an application. Initially the Web version
was designed for the external partners -- suppliers and clients -- to
interact with the company. Guess what, nowadays **all employees** of the
company use the Web version, though it's undoubtedly slower. They all
have a shortcut to the desktop application and no way, they use the web
version.
As for large companies investing millions in latest techs, sorry to
write that, and I do have an ACTUAL experience with a billion-dollar
company, they're just like dinosaurs compared to what startups can achieve.
Thierry Nivelet
FoxInCloud
Give your VFP app a second life in the cloud
http://foxincloud.com/
Le 03/06/2017 à 15:22, Charlie-gm a écrit :
On 6/3/2017 6:05 AM, Thierry Nivelet wrote:
[Lots of text snipped out below - trying to get to just key points]
Compared to browser incompatibilities, bizarre rendering that experts
could not figure out, security snafus, and did I mention pathetic
performance
browser incompatibilities
Again, this is from the past; except very advanced HTML5/CSS3
features, all browsers now follow the standard, including IE 10+ or Edge
This is not true in my ACTUAL experience. Even inside an huge
organization that spends 10's or 100's of millions of dollars a year
on internal software development.
And maybe I did not make something clear before: I'm talking about
internal enterprise applications. Not "general public" web pages. This
thread started with someone asking if anyone is even "looking for"
desktop applications any more. And my contention is if users actually
saw "rich client/desktop" applications in action, you better believe
they'd be begging for more (especially for internal enterprise
applications).
bizarre rendering that experts could not figure out
Your experts were in fact amateurs. Rendering is made by an algorithm
based on CSS: the browser’s CSS and your CSS. Each CSS directive has
a priority based on specificity and location in the CSS flow. Items
can either be rendered top-down or left-right (or
And there it is, just like I predicted. Someone would just blame the
developers as being stupid and not doing "HTML/CSS/AJAX/.NET?...."
correctly. They've been doing it for over 2 decades (25+ years),
including big hiring direct out of college where I would think all
that grand HTML/CSS/AJAX/.NET "standard" stuff is taught, yes? So if
you want to call all those people stupid, ok, fine by me. It does not
change the reality of terrible browser-based application results.
pathetic performance
Here is the truism; running a single application, on the single
machine, for a single user, will always be faster that running an
application that is shared across users, reachable through a
worldwide network, through a bunch of protocols. The real question is
the trade-off between: easily access from anywhere using any device
through any browser — desktop and/or handheld without any
installation, almost no training, no on-site maintenance, etc.
deploying on multiple workstations / synchronising databases
I'll reiterate I'm talking about internal enterprise applications.
Most "public" web pages in the world do work pretty well for a
specific purpose such as selling products, information publishing,
etc. Internal business applications that attempt to produce a lot of
specialized "business logic" value are what fails in my experience.
And, from what I've seen, the trend for mobile users IS NOT
browser-based any more. They build "custom" (aka rich-client) apps
that run on IOS or Android. For example, my bank DOES NOT force me to
use their web page on my phone: they created an app for me, as a
customer, to use. Why do you think they did that when they already had
web pages built?
Anyway, the main point is, inside an enterprise, where desktop
configurations are tightly controlled, it really is much more logical,
cost-effective, and cheaper to have rich client applications. You can
still access the data "from anywhere" - heck, even the internal
company web pages cannot be accessed unless I log in through VPN, etc.
And you did agree on a key point, but I'll phrase it a little
differently: rich client applications will always perform better than
browser based applications. Even going across the web. Because rich
client applications, by design, require less "traffic through the
wire" - rendering data, script "data", etc. None of that has to be
transmitted and then reinterpreted by some intermediary layer (aka a
browser). You can just pull "raw" data only. Therefore, rich client
will always be faster and yield a better experience to the end user.
And I'm afraid you are wrong regarding "training": the enterprise web
pages I've seen require massive training. In fact, most of my time in
my current company is "helping" people use the <bleeping> web pages.
Surely, you are not saying a hyperlink is "easier to understand" than
a button? Of course, any UI can be poor - it's just I've seen the
poorest designs in web pages.
discussing what alternative desktop dev. language we could choose
instead of VFP. The end decider is always the user. Each year 2.5 %
new users enter the work force (and almost as many retire) — what do
these people expect for the future? That we
To be clear, I am not pushing for VFP in this thread: in fact, since
it is still a closed, proprietary dev tool, I would not recommend it
for a new developer. I'm trying to make the conceptual point that rich
client applications are better for the user, especially when the
platform (aka the PC) is strictly controlled by an enterprise. And it
seems quite odd to me that that same strict control cannot yield a
consistent browser-application experience.
You ask what will users expect? My answer is they will expect trash if
trash is all they ever see. If you show them something responsive and
cool, they'll demand that. <shrug> I'm going to test this theory over
the next couple months.
The really sad thing is all the 'browser pundits' back in the 1990's
promised that web pages would give us "develop once run anywhere"
solutions and solve all distribution nightmares (like MS's dll-hell).
Well, here we are 25+ years later and those promises have not been
kept. We are just now getting close to what we had in the 1990's: that
would be hilarious except I see so many "young" developers claim this
stuff is fantastic advancements.
Last, I am not saying browser-based applications should be thrown
away. They work quite well for some types of needs - selling,
publishing, etc: but, inside an enterprise? They are a waste, and a
backwards LEAP, from my experience. But like most things in the world,
the truth does not really matter much. Gotta go where the "dollars"
are. That is a fact I have to learn to live with. It still does not
sit well with me though, which is why it triggered all this typing.
-Charlie
[excessive quoting removed by server]
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