John H. Robinson, IV wrote:
Paul G. Allen wrote:
I've found that if I want something that will run on, and/or be accessed
from multiple platforms, and have a GUI interface, a web front end is the
best way to do it. There's no windows and dialogs to create, no GUI toolkit
needed, no platform interoperability problems for the GUI, and
changes/upgrades are far easier.
I contend that web front ends are amongst the worst. A web browser is a
very poor generic application interface. There are too many random
differences in browsers and the way they interpret HTML. So not only do
you have to test your application on various platforms, but on various
application front end rendering agents (what the rest of us normally
call browsers).
Thus the need for the W3C HTML 4.01 standard and XHTML 1.0 standard and the
reasoning behind not using browser specific tags. Many end-users want a web
front end so they can access the software system from anywhere, on any
platform, without having to install a program on every machine they want to
access it from.
A Java applet can provide a GUI as well, at a possible cost in speed.
Of course, in a perfect world, all the tools would have CLI interfaces
Command Line Interface interfaces? ;)
will well-defined interfaces, so the interested parties can write
whatever GUI front ends they want.
This is fine for a developer, but most end users don't want to have to
write an interface (or can't), they just want to get their work done.
PGA
--
Paul G. Allen
Owner, Sr. Engineer, Security Specialist
Random Logic/Dream Park
www.randomlogic.com
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