On 6/3/2017 2:46 PM, Thierry Nivelet wrote:
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.
What do you want? Should I itemize the inconsistencies that I've seen
between browsers and even the same browser between applications? It is
pretty rude to say someone's "experience" is biased. That's like
saying I cannot see what is clearly in front of my face. I definitely
admit I have biases, but I do know how to make observations and listen
to people - especially when it is part of my job assignment. And I
thought it was pretty clear I did NOT uniformly reject the Web model.
I've developed many applications that USE the Internet - just not
within a browser. Perhaps you are the one that is biased because you
want everyone to buy your "browser based" product?
And this has nothing to do with a particular Web framework. Maybe the
dev teams are using .Net, maybe JBOSS, maybe JQuery, maybe something
else. Would you prefer to retract your previous statement that the
developers are CSS dummies (paraphrased) and say instead the
enterprise is stupid because it has not standardized on Bootstrap?
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 seriously doubt a "browser app" is what gave one company a boost
over another. More likely they had a better centralized data model and
feature set. Or maybe the loser just had a snobbier attitude toward
clients: that seems to be a frequent issue.
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
If you are saying the users have access to a "rich client" application
and a "browser based" application, and those applications look almost
identical, and those applications have the same functions, and those
applications access same data, and that the browser-based application
is slower. I find it very hard to believe the end users would prefer
the browser-based application if they knew the desktop one was
available. I am pretty confident that the user base at my organization
would be exclusively using the rich client one. A constant complaint I
hear from users at my company is the applications (all browser-based)
are too <bleeping> slow - which is why they just jump to the
Excel-export function and do their work in Excel (which, as a side
note, I think is pure poison to an enterprise - spreadsheets should be
out-right banned - they create islands of information, protected
data-turfs, etc.... but getting rid of spreadsheets is s a difficult
sell to users while all the <bleeping> browser-based applications are
so <bleeping> slow).
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.
So, what the hell, lets be clear. I'm talking about AT&T: that's the
company I'm working for now. So they're at 150+B/yr I think. They are
not a software company (although they claim they have made the
transition). And because of their size they spend far more on software
projects that most software-exclusive companies. And ooooooh yes, they
are a dinosaur (I find it ironic that Bell-labs gave the world "Unix"
- and compare that to AT&T today <g>). They have horrific, terrible,
software development practices which I'm trying to help change
(<picture of me with an eye-dropper of water in front of a 10,000 acre
forest fire>). And even AT&T is now taking a lot of their web pages
and creating "rich client" apps out of them for mobile devices (so
yeah, repeating the creation and maintenance of "GUI" programming 3 or
more times over). Of course, even if "desktop" designs would be the
standard, that multiplicity would still have happened because of major
platform differences. But the point is "browser world" promised we
would never have to do that again. They LIED!!!! (hahahaha, just
kidding, it was more naive thinking than malicious intent to get paid
to do the same thing over and over again... well, at least I hope
"most" people were not thinking that).
But remember what started this thread: "... does anyone even look for
desktop applications any more..." I rephrased that to "rich client"
applications because I think that is the really the point. And I think
that yes indeed, those kinds of applications are very much in demand -
if the user base knows they could get them. And from a technical point
of view, there really is no reason to NOT do rich client applications.
But you have to consider the context: if I want to publish some
products for people to buy, or I want to publish my vacation video, or
I want to put a whitepaper up on a blog... all those are really great
fits for brower-based code. But if performance is important for the
user, or if reducing network traffic is important, or if server load
is desired to be minimized, those are great fits for rich client
applications.
Anyway, I'm out. Enough time spent on this thread for me. I will do my
little experiment over the next few months and drop a note to the list
regarding the results: did the users prefer browser-based, or
desktop-based for my application.
-Charlie
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