For\u00a0enterprise applications, web-based architecture has great potential and advantages, especially in deployment and patching.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Web-based applications may also lower the hardware requirements for client-side PCs because most tasks are performed in the server-side.<\/p>\n
However, web-based applications also have several constraints:\u00a0requirement for\u00a0network infrastructure and bandwidth, UI capability limitations, report generation and printing, and security concerns (on browsers and on servers).\u00a0 One important reason for technologies like AJAX becoming so popular is that these dynamic page rendering techniques effectively saved bandwidth, which means lower cost\u00a0and better utilization of network.\u00a0\u00a0For report generation and printing,\u00a0all successful cases that I know are based on PDF or Word file generation.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Web application UIs have several challenges, such as\u00a0JavaScript, browser compatibility\/limitation, and lack of UI elements.\u00a0 JavaScript is a very loose language and most browsers\u00a0run these scripts based on\u00a0intepreters with not-so-great performance.\u00a0 For example, if you’ve used Siebel’s portal, you share the pain of a snail-paced UI.\u00a0 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”).\u00a0\u00a0Browser compatibilty and limitation issues still\u00a0are the pains in\u00a0web developers’ rears, such as supporting all different flavors of\u00a0IE and Firefox.<\/p>\n
HTML specifications offer very few UI elements.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The types of elements are even fewer than what VB 1.0 provided!\u00a0 What’s even better is that event handling of UI elements\u00a0is a known\u00a0headache generator.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 (Well, if a question can be\u00a0answered by Uncle Ben, the real problem is\u00a0profit-losing, not the question itself.)<\/p>\n
Web-based application development\u00a0is mature today\u00a0and there are many handy IDEs and tools to use.\u00a0 It is still actively evolving and we can see new tools and buzz words popping out in great velocity.\u00a0 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\u00a0learn from the history of Microsoft dominance.\u00a0 Well, this is just a theory.\u00a0 We saw people repeating other people’s path of failure before.\u00a0 I just assume\u00a0people today are smarter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For\u00a0enterprise applications, web-based architecture has great potential and advantages, especially in deployment and patching.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Web-based applications may also lower the hardware requirements for client-side PCs because most tasks are performed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}