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Comment by baud147258 | Hacker News Reader

The company where I work is doing (and is close to finishing) a big rewrite of one the product. The base version is deployed on-prem at our clients, the new one will be cloud service, with the same features. But the on-prem version is still worked on and supported (I'm working on it) alongside the cloud one, the cloud one is to offer a less cumbersome alternative.

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Is the on-prem one Windows based? Also by less cumbersome do you mean the cloud one has fewer features or is just easier to get up and running with it because it's a browser based. Are the company expecting your on-prem one to fade away over time etc? Could you give any information of what each was written in and an order of magnitude, hundres of thousands of loc etc. Sorry for all the questions but I'm nosey! No problem if you can't.

The on-prem is windows-based, we're delivering new version as msi. The goal of the cloud version is be easier to get up and running, since there's no installation steps and (I guess) less configuration to do. The company might want the on-prem to fade, but it won't happen in the short term since we still have clients. The on-prem is 15-20 years old, but not always actively worked on and with ~1M Loc (including sql scripts, setup, config files, but not the test suite). The cloud project started last year and I think there's already clients using it, but I don't have access to the code, so I have no idea for the loc.

Thanks for the info. I am involved with a Windows based product and we've thought now and again about doing something like this. We have a competitor that is browser and cloud based but the product seems to be a lot less featured. It feels like they are quite limited in what locally connected hardware (cameras, modems, card readers, barcode readers, printers and scanners) they can interact as well as seamless bridges to other locally installed software. With desktop software this is fairly straightforward but I don't know if this is/was a problem for cloud software.

I'm afraid I wasn't clear, it's installed on Windows server and user access it via Internet Explorer (because of ActiveX, in theory we'll do the switch for Chrome soon). To interact with card readers, cameras and printers, we're using a bunch of extension, including a java applet (!) that we'll have to migrate.

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