Fabrizio, in theory you are right. Practically speaking, webapps beat desktop apps almost all the time in usability.
They are far easier to install and keep up to date, they get the internet-enabled thing right whereas most desktop based apps don't (I'm talking about applications that integrate networking features such as connecting to friends, not that something 'runs on teh interwebs', that's kind of a given for webapps, and either irrelevant or a bad thing, as it means you're dependent on a connection!), they tend to be far more usable by people with accessibility issues than desktop apps. They tend to crash less. They tend to look better. They tend to be easier to write. Case in point: The best email client ever written is gmail, no doubts about it. The only other mail program I know of that gets mail this right is Mailplane, but that's cheating, because its just a webkit instance running gmail.com with gears pre-installed and some magic to make file attachments work better. Even comparing it to something good like Mail.app or Thunderbird, it's in a league of its own. On Dec 22, 4:48 pm, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > > Da : Kfir Shay <[email protected]> > A : [email protected] > Oggetto : Re: [The Java Posse] Re: Why is Netbeans > > Eclipse? > Data : Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:21:57 -0500 > > > I heard about this obscure app called Gmail that uses > > HTTP/HTML/JavaScript, word on the street is that it works > > pretty well for a set of hacks ;) > > Well, yes it's a set of hacks. :-) In the end, unfortunately > I have to say that the fact that a thing works doesn't imply > it is well designed: this statement is drawn from my > experience, having seen tons of industrial systems in banks, > trade exchanges, telcos, real time telemetry systems, > industrial control processes and whatever, all of them > "working" and most of them with a lot of hacks in some part > of the system. > > I don't use GMail, because I think it's crazy to put all my > email in Google's hands (but this is another point). I don't > think that its success is due to the particular technology, > rather to Google big power in pushing its solutions because > they are fashionable (not by chance I say that Google is XXI > century Microsoft - of course, their technology is anyway > much superior to Microsoft's). > > I also see that in order to having it work properly, they > had to introduce Gears, which - yes - is another hack to the > concept of webapp. I think that if Adobe were interested in > the same core business, they could have done it with Flex. > > > And if your backend is scalable and done right than you > > get the best of both worlds > > Yes, and here Google has got the supremacy of course, but I > think it's not relevant to the rest of the discussion. You > can plug any kind of client technology on a scalable back > end. > > > Fabrizio did you try to use a desktop mail client with 6k > > (~2.5GB) messages in your inbox... why won't you do that > > on your desktop and tell its better than Gmail > > At the moment I have 2.5k messages in my inbox with > Thunderbird (my fault, it's not a tidy management of email > if you have so many in inbox, but that's another matter) and > other mailboxes with more than 10k emails (e.g. the Wicket > one). It works, and it doesn't sound slow, what's the > problem? :-) There are other implementation details of > Thunderbird that I don't like. > > -- > f.g. > > -- > Fabrizio Giudici, Ph.D. - Java Architect, Project Manager > Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere." > weblogs.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici -www.tidalwave.it/blog > [email protected] - mobile: +39 348.150.6941 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" 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/javaposse?hl=en.
