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Question of the Day: Which legendary musicians or bands have you seen live?
Given a choice between desktop & web app, which would you choose?
- Thread starter spxza
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iceman_coolasice
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From a maintenance point of view and additions etc. Definitely thin client - web app. Rishan Singh
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I really didn't read through all of the responses, but here's my 2c as someone coming in from both sides (and mostly concentrating on web apps since 2002)
It depends
You can't just blindly decide "everything should be and will be web based". Nor can you say the opposite. It really depends on the nature of your application, what it is intended for and what kind of tasks it needs to perform.
Having said that, a good blend of both worlds can be achieved whereby you can have "thin-clients" (as I call them) that are essentially desktop-based apps get their data via a web service of some kind (caching wherever necessary) and also have a website sourcing data from the same service.
This allows you to have a very robust and powerful application to which people have access through either web or desktop. For example a sales rep would have the desktop app at work, but if he needs to check something on the road (or input data) he can use a straightforward-no-frills web app. This then affords him the ease-of-use of just connecting to any client's firewalled intranet (that has internet access) and gets him access to his company data.
That can, in turn, be turned into a smartphone application as well. Possibilities are endless.
However, like I said, this should be viewed on a case-to-case basis. If there's no reason for a desktop app, go web app. With local bandwidth being unlimited with some hosts and some ADSL connections these days, it's quite affordable and also much safer and less taxing on internal systems (you don't need your own servers/backup power etc, basically just a router connecting the office to the internet)
Pro's and con's exist with both, and most problems can be solved in both. Personally I think a symbiotic existence between web and desktop is what is needed (not always required, but still need to be thought of carefully) and to push forward into the future
It depends
You can't just blindly decide "everything should be and will be web based". Nor can you say the opposite. It really depends on the nature of your application, what it is intended for and what kind of tasks it needs to perform.
Having said that, a good blend of both worlds can be achieved whereby you can have "thin-clients" (as I call them) that are essentially desktop-based apps get their data via a web service of some kind (caching wherever necessary) and also have a website sourcing data from the same service.
This allows you to have a very robust and powerful application to which people have access through either web or desktop. For example a sales rep would have the desktop app at work, but if he needs to check something on the road (or input data) he can use a straightforward-no-frills web app. This then affords him the ease-of-use of just connecting to any client's firewalled intranet (that has internet access) and gets him access to his company data.
That can, in turn, be turned into a smartphone application as well. Possibilities are endless.
However, like I said, this should be viewed on a case-to-case basis. If there's no reason for a desktop app, go web app. With local bandwidth being unlimited with some hosts and some ADSL connections these days, it's quite affordable and also much safer and less taxing on internal systems (you don't need your own servers/backup power etc, basically just a router connecting the office to the internet)
Pro's and con's exist with both, and most problems can be solved in both. Personally I think a symbiotic existence between web and desktop is what is needed (not always required, but still need to be thought of carefully) and to push forward into the future
ToxicBunny
Oi! Leave me out of this...
Tut tut tut... such archaic thinking..
The batch file should have been in the login script... user does nothing, knows nothing and always has the most up to date version at the start of every working day.
Tut tut tut... such archaic thinking..
The batch file should have been in the login script... user does nothing, knows nothing and always has the most up to date version at the start of every working day.
We deployed during the day so that method worked, there was no need for the users to log off and on everytime we did a change, just close the application and open it again... It was seemless to the users they just knew that there is shortcut for opening the application.