Web Applications are Overrated | Hacker News Reader

Web Applications are Overrated

code-ronin.blogspot.com

19 pointsbootload16 comments

"what problem does a web application solve that a desktop application does not?"

security, backup, mainentance, collaboration, streamlined development, agnostic client, open source, economies of scale for administration, development, and deployment, etc., etc., etc.

Oh ye of little vision.

Good article to time capsule for a nice laugh in 2011.

How about this:

"What problem does a web application solve that a desktop GUI frontend to a network server does not?"

Browsers are huge beasts. If, looking at a single application, one could take away from the browser all the things that a particular application does not need, what would that application's size be? Given good UI libraries, perhaps a million times smaller?

Of course, it's the good old "Worse is better" again. I haven't lost hope, though. I'm sure we can come up with something better than the browser.

edit As an example of something vastly better that already exists in a stable form: http://www.rebol.com/docs/easy-vid.html

Seems like a pretty elegant language but it needs more parentheses.

accessibility as well.

I can access news.yc on my t-mobile dash, my mac, my desktop & my friend can access it on his iphone or ubuntu machine. Installed native apps can't do this, unless you install them, which requires download and os compatibility.

disabled people use accessibility differently. you might want to use ubiquity or platform-independence as alternative phrases.

But yes, i totally agree with you. multimodal data/application access is a beautiful thing.

You are right. But I have a question: what are network desktop applications like iTunes good for?

Nothing you can't get from Pandora (or Seeqpod).

I was going to add "unless you're not in a hotspot", but browsers are going to cache more and more, so that's not going to be as true.

This article misses the point badly. Sure, web apps are becoming thicker clients. But they're clients which run on any OS (and often on your phone), and can be downloaded with no install process and few worries about malware. And how many of your old stand-alone apps are even clients at all?

From the developer's perspective, it's even better: there's no upgrade process for your users, so new features and bugfixes can go out to all your users instantly (or not, your choice).

"We now have technologies that effectively mix web and desktop technologies, something I like to call 'webtop clients', manifest in Adobe Flash Player, Java Applets, and Microsoft Silverlight."

1. Flash is used for: video, music, ads (usually also only to enable video), and sites for the sort of web design shops you don't want to hire. Also, games, a special case. When was the last time you saw Flash used to recreate a desktop-GUI-style app? That OpenLaszlo (sp?) sure is taking the world by storm, eh?

2. Nobody uses Java applets.

3. Nobody uses Silverlight.

Statelessness is the core strength of the web, and the core strength of web applications. The limitations the web naturally imposes make for better applications and a better user experience than the GUI paradigm. (Every time I hear about some great new continuation-based web framework, there's always an example showing how easy it is to create the equivalent of a modal dialogue, and I always want to hit the writer over the head with a copy of a decent book on interface design. Modes are bad! Statelessness is good! The resource-centric model is good! Users like these things for the same reason you like REST better than SOAP and modular code rather than otherwise — people don't do modes!

(Sorry for the rant, these GUI partisans get me riled up.)

Have a look at http://flex.org/showcase . Flex is used for a whole lot more than video/music/ads/games. Yahoo Maps is built in Flex, fyi.

Daniel

Flex is Flash with GUI love. With Flash 9 using a better caching mechanism for the Flex framework, we may see it used more often online.

Re: Nobody uses Silverlight: some tv channels (Italian RAI, Dutch NOS) do for streaming TV over the web. Don't know why, though.

I think we'll eventually see the convergence of web apps and desktop apps. Sort of a hybrid of the two. AIR and Google Gears are steps in that direction.

I think what he's missing is that "Web Application" is one of the first things to come out of the technology department that's largely lived up to its hype. People like that.

Until we can move data across a network (or worse yet, the Internet!) as fast as data moves from the hard drive to the processor, we will have a need for client-side apps.

Only if that's your bottle-neck.

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