On Tuesday 12 June 2007 10:41, Kneo wrote: > Give me some examples of features that you can think of for a desktop > application. Something which cannot be done (or maybe with a lot of > difficulty) in a web browser.
Use of local libraries/executables. Pre-seeding data. Realtime operations (realtime as in knowing the precise timings of incoming/outgoing data or command execution). Vendor compatibility. Parallel execution of code. Vector operations, 3D+textures in particular. Yes, there are solutions that address these problems, but they are cumbersome, non-portable and come down to having a desktop application which is then shoehorned into a browser (flash, Java applets, ActiveX are the prime examples for this, they could very well be standalone applications/libs, you just have the browser as an additional integrating layer of software). And let's not mix HTTP (as in protocol) and browser (as in HTML/JS visualizer). You can have a desktop app that uses HTTP for comms and a browser that works for a particular application without a TCP/IP stack. But then again, there are a myriad desktop GIS applications, and the web based approach was embraced by many exactly because these were not available on every machine, not because browsers are all that practical. _______________________________________________ mapguide-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapguide-users
