For most of us, especially given these tough economic times, for the Web to have become the platform of choice for enterprise application development seems like a no-brainer. But to paraphrase The Return of the Living Dead, maybe we need more brains.
Sure, Google has a vested influence in pushing computing into the cloud. Unless your company is also a leading provider of Internet information services, however, you don't have as much incentive.
Web development is popular because it's fast, versatile, and relatively inexpensive -- and it's certainly easy to find developers. But that doesn't mean the alternatives don't have advantages of their own, and in some cases the Web's weaknesses might outweigh its strengths. In the interest of healthy debate, here are five reasons why concentrating your development efforts on browser-based apps might not be the best idea.
1. It's client-server all over again.
Web applications encourage a thin-client approach: the client handles UI rendering and user input, while the real processing happens on servers. What sense does that make when any modern laptop packs enough CPU and GPU power to put yesterday's Cray supercomputer to shame?
Concentrating computing power in the datacenter is fine if you're a Google or a Microsoft, but that approach puts a lot of pressure on smaller players. Scaling small server farms to meet demand can be a real challenge -- just ask Twitter.
Furthermore, security vulnerabilities abound in networked applications, and the complexity of the browser itself seemingly makes bugs inevitable. Why saddle your apps with that much baggage?
2. Web UIs are a mess.
The Web's stateless, mainly forms-based UI approach is reliable, but it's not necessarily the right model for every application. Why sacrifice the full range of real-time interactivity offered by traditional, OS-based apps? Technologies such as AJAX only simulate in the browser what systems programming could do already.
And while systems programmers are accustomed to building apps with consistent UI toolkits such as the Windows APIs, Apple's Cocoa, or Nokia's Qt, building a Web UI is too often an exercise in reinventing the wheel. Buttons, controls, and widgets vary from app to app. Sometimes the menus are along the top, other times they're off to the side. Sometimes they pop down when you roll over them, and sometimes you have to click. That inconsistency hurts your development budget, but it hurts usability more.
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