Article For Monse
<div class="IPBDescription">and others interested in MS</div> <a href='http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html' target='_blank'>http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html</a>
very interesting article detailing the large movements and forces that may affect that ever so large company in redmond.
very interesting article detailing the large movements and forces that may affect that ever so large company in redmond.
Comments
This might need to go to Discussion at some point. <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Otherwise an interesting article. Very nice find Niteowl!
That article is good one, so good it got me off task at work, I will post more on my thoughts later,
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying there will or should be any kind of big move over. It would be retarted to have to use a web app for a word processor or a spreadsheet program, but there are some things that web sites could do as good as or better than a small client/server app.
Online banking is a great example: My bank used to have an old school custom made program you dialed into and everything, but it was pretty crappy. Now that's gone away and they have a rather spiffy website. I don't have to worry about reinstalling crap and I can check my balance from anywhere, so I'd definately say that's an improvement over the old version.
An example of a bad web app: Our company recently switched accounting packages from some crappy software to a crappy web app. It was pretty impressive at first being that you could drag and drop and do all kinds of event driven crap you would only expect from a traditional app, but it had some major problems that made it really suck. We ditched it and are now using some third thing that I don't know or care about since that's not my problem anyway.
p.s.
<img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/style_images/TSA_Skin-975/icon12.gif' border='0' alt='user posted image' /> PHP
Here I quote myself, and hopefully Doom reads my whole reply next time. <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo--> Don't you remember that my wife works on online banking apps?
No, I don't recall that being mentioned. And I had to run off to class so I didnt have time to read everybody's entire reply.
Eep. :o
p.p.s.
<img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/style_images/TSA_Skin-975/icon12.gif' border='0' alt='user posted image' /> PHP
I <i>can</i> imagine web-apps taking off. Bandwidth and security technologies keep improving, and I'm sure there will come a point when it's viable. I don't know if that will herald the death of the desktop, and I have my doubts (trying to predict the death of <i>anything</i> in the computer world is always fraught with difficulty. Well, perhaps not <i>predicting</i> stuff, but certainly <i>being right</i> about what you're predicting <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->).
[rant]What annoys me about the whole issue is that, as far as I can tell, incompatabilities and importabilities mostly arrise from people disregarding the standards and\or h4x0ring their way around. Then there's all these instances of saying that OO failed to deliver on its promises of being a holy grail, with the previous sentence mentioning a supposed deficiency of OO when in fact OO principles were violated... It's hard to make standards work when people ignore them. And say what you like about polymorphism and inheritance, but encapsulation is God.[/rant]
It is not about compatibility but rather it is about practicality. Why do you want to abandon your investment in the workstations and run all the apps from a centralized server? Having a web app version of MS Word is spiffy, but why do that when you have already paid through your nose for MS Office?
This has a good point in it, except for some often little known realities:
Bandwidth has, <i>in the US</i>, often become much more available and inexpensive. However, in Europe and especially the mideast/asia, it is still very very precious. When you work on projects outside the country, you quickly find that the American thought of a 'high-bandwidth' link starts at the T-1/3 mark, whereas in Europe it's often 128K. In the mideast it is even worse, and considerably less reliable. And even in the US it's still very low generally when you are talking about site links between remote offices and operations centers/HQ's. At the previous 3 banks I have done work for, they thought nothing of having a T-3 internet link, and also nothing of having 64K links to all their bank branches. At NCF Corp, they have 600 bank branches linked by <b>16K frame relay cononections</b>. Which they ran webmail and a web loan application over from the main offices, and kept the lines flooded basically 8 hours a day. Completely ridiculous, ran like crap, caused tons of issues, and they had no way to fix it without spending a millions and millions in upgrades and then millions more in increased annual line fees. They scrapped all the web apps (except mail) and went back to the client-server drawing board after fighting it for a year. To their credit, they were lied to by their Novell vendor that made silly promises about using their local netware servers to cache http, which of course never worked.
I think the world's network infrastructure needs another solid 10 years before making web apps across the board truly feasible. Both internally and externally to other networks.