I've been a developer for some time, doing clientserver type apps back in the 90's and now exclusively web based apps mostly. .net and java. After a few bad experience with a large user bases and deployment of client server applications I swear that web based apps were the way to go. I've seen several transitary evolutions. from "fat clients" where almost everything was done on the client side, to so called thin clients were all the work was pushed to the server side, now more recently with the advent of ajax the trend seems to be somewhere in the middle.
Than there is the iphone, which basically is just another platform. problem is that I think many people who have done any development on mobile platforms have worked with windows ce or j2me, and have dealt with very limited browsers, so most of the internet access is done natively on the device. We are trying to come up with a widearea version of the simple artshow application we put together. Artshow as a webapplication looks really good on an iphone. It meets most of the ui guidelines. Its basically the client for a java based web servlet that allows browsing of various directories of photos. We want to add location capabilities using bonjour and upnp. Artshow is a java jsf appication which uses the icefaces component platform, which among other nice features provides server push capabilities. It functions quite well in a simple uiwebviewController too. http://mooncatventures.com/blogs/atlantis/archive/2008/12/27/artshow-demo-is-now-available-for-demo.aspx My first thought was to break out a lot of functionality from the online to the objective-c native code, I've seen this in a lot of applications, but than I thought why. All the resources are on the server so whats the point of having to make native calls to the server and process locally. And what occurred to me that developing on this platform should be no different than developing any other rich client application on a normal desktop platform. Say in flash or flex or vb.net. Do all the web functionality on the backend where it belongs and natively do the functions that need to be local. ie. Accessing the sql database, local picture directories , camera and the gps for geotracking. Just seems to me everytime someone comes up with a new platforms well proven techniques are lost in the translation. just my opinion. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iPhoneWebDev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/iphonewebdev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
