Mission Critical Applications and Web Based UIs?

Posted by Cliff on Monday September 10, 2001 @05:18AM from the wrangling-complex-interfaces-from-HTML dept.

Jonny Quest asks: "I work for a company with an excellent Client-Server based product. Unfortunately it's not 'Web-Based' (whatever that means). Ours is a 'Line-of-Business' app, i.e. it means that those people who use it absolutely depend on it for making money - if the app is down, they can't process their orders, service their clients & employees, etc. at all - mission critical in other words, and they spend ALL day in the app. What's the best UI that any Slashdotter has seen for a 'Web Based' app? Something with a rich user interface and some decent multiscreen handling (the current app has about 200 screens...)?" 'Web-Based', that's such a loaded buzzword, and like most buzzwords no one is really quite clear on what it means. Does it mean HTML+CGI? Does that allow for Java? Cold-Fusion? Internet operation or just Intranet (if it's mission critical, it better be the latter, and even then...)? Would any of you recommend deploying a mission-critical application over the web? If so, how would you do it? What technologies would you use and what is to be avoided at all costs?

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Intranet and Internet by Malduin · 2001-09-10 05:44 · Score: 2, Interesting

I work in the Client Services department of a fast-growing media company and am also doing the same type of work. However, I started out doing everything web based so that everyone with a decent, later version browser can use our mission critical system. It includes tracking fulfillment status, client relationship management, monitoring, catalogging, and many other management utilities that go with our business. I have been developing this site for a few months now on an intranet server. However, there is a need to outsource some of these utitilies when we outsource our help desk support or employees need the information on road trips. This called for an intranet development server where the development goes on and an internet production server that has the stable functionality of the system and gets updated after each milestone. Personally, I think it's a fairly nice way of implementing a mission critical system but would also like to see what other /.ers think.

BTW - If your curious, I wrote all the server-side stuff in ASP (we're practically married to Microsoft). However, my boss also wants to have a mirrored copy on a Linux server written in PHP so a case like another Code Red incident won't wipe everything out.