UI Development (3)
January 20th, 2008
For enterprise applications, web-based architecture has great potential and advantages, especially in deployment and patching. For web-based applications, IT people no longer need to install computer by computer (theorectically), and having fewer applications installed on a PC implies stabler system. Web-based applications may also lower the hardware requirements for client-side PCs because most tasks are performed in the server-side.
However, web-based applications also have several constraints: requirement for network infrastructure and bandwidth, UI capability limitations, report generation and printing, and security concerns (on browsers and on servers). One important reason for technologies like AJAX becoming so popular is that these dynamic page rendering techniques effectively saved bandwidth, which means lower cost and better utilization of network. For report generation and printing, all successful cases that I know are based on PDF or Word file generation. As to security concerns, most SI vendors are supposed to know what they need to be aware of, however, it usually depends on how much resources will actually be invested, which is out of this article’s scope.
Web application UIs have several challenges, such as JavaScript, browser compatibility/limitation, and lack of UI elements. JavaScript is a very loose language and most browsers run these scripts based on intepreters with not-so-great performance. For example, if you’ve used Siebel’s portal, you share the pain of a snail-paced UI. AJAX could somehow deceive the slowness provided that the UI can not be too complex (and that’s why Google’s interfaces are always so “clean”). Browser compatibilty and limitation issues still are the pains in web developers’ rears, such as supporting all different flavors of IE and Firefox.
HTML specifications offer very few UI elements. If the control that you want to use is not provided in HTML form, you are pretty much on your own to struggle the way out. The types of elements are even fewer than what VB 1.0 provided! What’s even better is that event handling of UI elements is a known headache generator. Fortunately, there are so many developers working out their ways and most of the problems can be answered by either Google search or mighty Uncle Ben. (Well, if a question can be answered by Uncle Ben, the real problem is profit-losing, not the question itself.)
Web-based application development is mature today and there are many handy IDEs and tools to use. It is still actively evolving and we can see new tools and buzz words popping out in great velocity. One thing that we can be sure is the diversity of tools and platforms for web-based applications will remain the same, because everyone is supposed to learn from the history of Microsoft dominance. Well, this is just a theory. We saw people repeating other people’s path of failure before. I just assume people today are smarter.
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