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I just don't get why everyone is sold on web apps. They are an absolute pain to develop compared to writing native apps.

I know people talk about deployment and so on, but really, that is easily solved with auto-updating clients.

I for one wish web apps would go away and we could go back to native clients.

(For LOB anyway which is what I spend a lot of my time on)

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I agree - I'm not sold on web apps in general, but they do work very well for certain things (email is the classic example).

Despite the hype, I'm not sure how many people are really sold on them. In practice I use native apps 99% of the time. When I'm number crunching Excel, Matlab, Python are all native. When I'm programming (even developing webapps!) Emacs, Mercurial, etc are all native apps.

Web apps still have a long, long way to go before I will be ready to do my day to day work in them.

I still believe that a best-of-both-worlds is possible, and probably coming. But I sort of agree with you in the sense that I would much, much rather have only Internet-connected native clients, than only web apps. Fortunately it doesn't have to be one or the other.

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