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The Case Against Web Apps
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister offers five reasons why companies should re-consider concentrating their development efforts on browser-based apps. As McAllister sees it, Web apps encourage a thin-client approach to development that concentrates far too much workload in the datacenter. And while UI and tool limitations are well known, the Web as 'hostile territory' for independent developers is a possibility not yet fully understood. Sure, Web development is fast, versatile, and relatively inexpensive, but long term, the browser's weaknesses might just outweigh its strengths as an app delivery platform."
The fact that the different browsers render basic sites differently should be warning enough. Add to that different versions etc; You will never have a standardised audience to utilise these. It will always be lowest common denominator.
I thought decentralization was supposed to be a good thing, the whole motivation behind having personal computers to begin with but, in the age of web apps everywhere, we seem to be returning to the days of the totalitarian, you'll-do-it-our-way-and-like-it data center (mainframe) model.
in this modern day-and-age, most stuff is just data anyways, and that is all database. Moving to a true client architecture, oh wait, all the data is still stored centrally, and most reports are all done via stored procedures.
Even with true clients, much data processing is still done in the datacenter. maybe some advanced analysis is done on other machines with a data dump, but still... it's all data
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
The web used to be hyperlinked documents, but has since turned into a spaghetti of an application hell-bent on delivering ads, peeping into your web browsing habits, and trying to infect your computer with viruses.
Bring back the document-based web! Bring back content! Bring back control to your computer! Say no to webpages that insist on running code on your computer.
While I think the arguments against web-apps are valid, it is the newest trend and people will not listen. It will require a few very expensive catastrophies, before something happens. And then people will still not undterstand what the problem is, just that there were expensive catastrophies.
By now I believe most technological trends are not rational.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
To my mind the biggest weakness of web apps is that you have a hard time doing any sort of schedualed reporting/exports to use in another application. It can be done, but you really have to have the stars line up just right, or use some 3rd party scripting of some sort. Doable, but painful. God forbid you want to share data between two web apps, especially when company A and company B both have it in their heads that the other should pay them for development assistance.
My biggest complaint about browser/web apps is the inconsistent or non-existent ability to navigate the app with the keyboard.
While fat client apps can have messed up tab stops, they're generally better than their web-based counterparts. A CLI is even better allowing for things to be done in bulk/batch.
I've got over 100 buttons right at my finger tips. I shouldn't need 2 more that roll around (FPS mouselook not withstanding). Let me ALT+whatever and TAB my way around.
YMMV.
Right now web apps are king because they're always only the nearest computer away, and work on almost everything.
We're getting close to devices that provide the same functionality in a mobile form factor. Once everyone has an iphone like device that has a standard development environment we'll likely see a resurgence of local apps. But that's probably a years away at best.
Right now, you can either develop for the web, which will work everywhere, or write one app in Win32/.Net, one in Objective C for Mac, one in Java with Blackberry specific apis, one in Objective C for iPhone, one in [whatever palm is up to], one in .net for winmobile, etc, etc etc.
The only reason client side apps were ever written was because you could be fairly sure windows was your target, or it simply wasn't feasible to centralize and so you forced a standard environment.
There's no single platform anymore, and probably won't be for a while (and when it comes it'll look a lot like a web browser), so the only viable option is web based.
Does it suck? Yes and no. It's definitely better than debugging an app on 40 different platform/cpu/os version combinations.
Enterprise applications should run on dedicated, fully optimized hardware that can be bolted to employees faces.
As far as a web browser for every employee, there are organizations that "value" productivity and organizations that actually understand how to maximize it.
But I thought the web was good?
WRONG! The web is bad! Well, sometimes, for some things... maybe.
There's a grab-bag of random thoughts there on some things that could be inherent problems in the web and some that are merely artifacts, and it seems neither here nor there.
The big guys always call the shots - who cares if it's browsers or operating systems, you're not going to tell MS (or Apple, just to be fair) what to do and there's no guarantee the next SP or random security patch won't bone all your effort with no notice or recourse, whether it's in-browser or on the desktop.
And the web UIs are a mess? That's nothing to do with the web - lots of people design lots of stuff, you get randomness. It's no different than on the desktop, except the long reign of some MS products and the fact that developing Windows apps you get to use some of those same form controls gets you the appearance of this magical consistency that's really just the consequence of monoculture. Open any full-screen app (read: game) and it's a brave new world, like on the web, because the pre-generated MS controls and constraints don't apply. But this is good, right, because you're not doing what the man tells you to do?
And the productivity argument... did he just need to reach 5? You can block the outside world coming in over the wire, it's not that big an effort, and then people will find other ways to screw around - hand-held devices are so powerful now the whole issue of limiting the desktop to work issues only is quickly becoming moot.
And so on and so forth... I guess it's redundant to say "you need to consider each usage case based on its specific merits," but then the decision-makers don't...
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
The right answer might be Java (yes applets) (for web applications). Too many online apps suffer from GUI design flaws/look and feel etc, because it web site (touch feely girly developers & marketing driods) have far too input. Applets if done right with webservices for backend data comms would work well and be consistent (consistent as the code monkey wants to make it).
Note that many desktop apps hit web services or communicate via HTTP now, mostly because it's 1. easy and 2. SOA became the flavor of the month about a year or so ago.
Also, many enterprise web apps, at least that I've used, have some sort of plugin/JVM requirement. Are they a desktop app? Web app? Some awesomely funky in-between?
Personally, I think these "thick vs. thin" client discussions are a nice waste of time and excuse to get page impressions.
Let's deconstruct, shall we?
Running Outlook and Office will immediately slow that poor laptop to molasses. Add a nice shiny .NET app, or worse, Java, and you've got yourself a tarpit.
You, my friend, have never used internally developed VB6 apps. I say no more.
For some applications, I completely agree. But not everybody needs to see dynamic fluid modeling or stock quotes for 3000 securities in a real-time heatmap.
Good call, time to turn to Java and .NET, which aren't controlled by big vendors.
Because deploying and maintaining desktop apps across thousands of machines is wicked easy.
It wants its irrational fear of the web back.
Web apps are not new. We have seen numerous expensive catastrophes. And the trend is not reversing.
Hell we keep pushing more and more in the direction of SOA and chubby clients (thicker than thin, but thinner than thick).
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I'm a software support rep and not even a developer and I know this is a blowhard troll.
1. It's client-server all over again.
Web applications encourage a thin-client approach: the client handles UI rendering and user input, while the real processing happens on servers. What sense does that make when any modern laptop packs enough CPU and GPU power to put yesterday's Cray supercomputer to shame?
Concentrating computing power in the datacenter is fine if you're a Google or a Microsoft, but that approach puts a lot of pressure on smaller players. Scaling small server farms to meet demand can be a real challenge -- just ask Twitter.
Furthermore, security vulnerabilities abound in networked applications, and the complexity of the browser itself seemingly makes bugs inevitable. Why saddle your apps with that much baggage?
First, it's not client server all over again, not in the way you mean it. Client/server like windows terminal server or citrix makes it easier to manage company wide systems by giving an IT guy a central point to manage, and that saves time, which translates to dollars. Web apps do the same thing, but they are benefit from even easier setup management and deployment. Terminal server is a pain in the ass when it comes to deploying an app, because it has several ways to do so, none of them web based. You could deploy it by giving everyone a desktop to the terminal server, but then the dumbass users can't figure out which is their PC desktop and which is their server desktop. You could publish the app, which requires changing settings on the server and deploying the proper shortcut to the user's desktop, which takes more knowledge, which not everyone has.
Web apps are easier to deploy in that all you have to do is provide a web address. Everyone knows how to use a web browser and click on links. Citrix even recognized this and provides software to allow you to connect to the citrix box with a web interface!
Siting a laptop is stronger than an old cray is a clever misdirection. The real question is, what's more beneficial for your business, 30 laptops that cost $1000 apiece? Or 1 very large server that costs $10,000 plus 30 laptops costing $500 apiece? I just saved you $5000 on hardware! Plus when a laptop dies, there's less downtime, because I could just hand you another machine and you just go to the web address again. No application reinstalls. Most mega servers these days cost less than a distributed environment and can handle processing quite nicely.
As far as network vulnerabilities, that's just utterly nonsensical. How does that statement say that a webapp is less vulnerable than a distributed app? Data still has to travel over a network in a distributed app! Duh! Besides, most of the vulnerabilities these days dealt with IE specifically and those dealt with how it was integrated with Windows. Pick another web browser, viola, reduced vulnerabilities. Take it a step further and deploy the web app as an intranet app so it can't be accessed outside your local subnet. Network security is for the network professionals, let them take care of it. Provide encryption as needed in the app and access levels for the data but other than that, that's not a developer's domain.
2. Web UIs are a mess.
The Web's stateless, mainly forms-based UI approach is reliable, but it's not necessarily the right model for every application. Why sacrifice the full range of real-time interactivity offered by traditional, OS-based apps? Technologies such as AJAX only simulate in the browser what systems programming could do already.
And while systems programmers are accustomed to building apps with consistent UI toolkits such as the Windows APIs, Apple's Cocoa, or Nokia's Qt, building a Web UI is too often an exercise in reinventing the wheel. Buttons, controls, and widgets vary from app to app. Sometimes the menus are along the top, other times they're off to the side. Sometimes they pop down when you roll over them, and s
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I believe web-versus-desktop is mostly a false dichotomy. The problem is that our standards need a rethink. Web browsers started as a kind of e-brochure viewers, and this e-brochure approach was shoehorned into C.R.U.D. uses (biz forms, data-sheets, and reports).
What is really needed is a "GUI browser" standard and/or OSS tool that has most of the desktop-like GUI functionality and behavior we've all grown to like. BUT, this "GUI browser" could ALSO be used for desktop development. Thus, one does not have to learn a different UI platform when toggling between desktop and web projects.
Most GUI kits have made this difficult by making GUI's language-specific. Fitting these to other languages is often almost as forced as HTML-browser-to-CRUD shoehorn jobs. What needs to be done is the design of a GUI protocol that is mostly declarative. Being mostly declarative makes it easier to use by different languages and paradigms. In my opinion, the "everything must be OOP" thinking is largely what has got us stuck with language-specific kits. OOP is not well-suited to declarative APIs/protocols in my opinion. Encapsulation generally leads to behavior-centric API/protocol designs. (Some disagree, it makes for an interesting and heated debate.)
The behavior-centric approaches of existing GUI kits hinders this goal. Most common GUI actions can be defined declaratively if you think about it a bit. The remaining that require Turing-Complete coding can be done by server-side and/or client-side app languages using the more lower-level features of the GUI-browser.
Think of it as kind of as a smarter and HTTP-friendly rework of X-Windows where one usually deals at the widget-level instead of at key-stroke level (but key-stroke level is still possible as an option).
Table-ized A.I.
I second this.
What about all those fine thick client apps that refuse to run unless they have elevated privileges on the workstation?
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Because they shouldn't have to spend much time -- design it properly, and it should just work on any browser that does a good job with standard HTML.
And because if you do test on all browsers, you'll end up with a more robust app -- not just against those versions, but against future versions. For example, if you only developed for Firefox and IE, you might easily be relying on a bug common to Firefox and IE.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I think you're going to see an explosion of standalone applications tethered to a web-based datasource or back-end. iPhone and Android basically do this already - taking their cue from email programs since the dawn of the internet. Programs like Steam allow you to install local, fat clients through a thin client interface. Each of those pieces has a reason for being fat or thin, and you want to take advantage of that.
I think, in the end, the point is that you want to be confident your interface is usable where-ever, and that your backend can be swapped up without version issues, and that either way the program can do everything it needs to. The web is very good at the first two, it's just that the domain of problems it can manage has not yet expanded to the third. Is that anything but a matter of time?
[Ego]out
The thing is, most browsers display stuff differently because they're not adhering to a common standard. There is less reason for me to develop for IE if they're going to belligerently never fix a compatibility issue with their browser.
But, on the other hand, most browsers are moving to a common standard. Ultimately speaking, needing to cross-platform a webapp is going to be eliminated - or all but. Robustness is a useful quality, but spending time on something now that is going to not be an issue in the future is not a useful pursuit. In most cases, designing for these compatibility issues falls into that category.
In short; you easily could be relying on a common bug, but you just as easily might not be. There is no reason to second guess yourself for such a small return.
[Ego]out
Quite a bit, actually. First and foremost is the convenience of application access. There is no software to install and you can use your applications anywhere you have access to a web browser. In addition, the rise of web applications has spurred the rise of web services. Web services share out tremendous amounts of public information allowing developers to "mashup" (I hate that term) data sources to produce superior applications. Compare that to the desktop where just getting the programs on your system to cooperate is a challenge! (To say nothing of networking.)
When software installation is so easy, and one's package manager downloads stuff using http, there is no real advantage in this case. Instead of searching on google, and going to a website, you search in pacman or yum or apt or synaptic and click on a "page" to load. As a bonus feature, it's much faster next time.
I personally have written an application for my current employer that requires the client to dynamically sort a 100,000 record data set in nothing but client-side Javascript. Significant computer science had to go into creating an optimized, multi-threaded algorithm that would perform well on the lowest common denominator. (IE6) The next generation of browsers that are appearing (Chrome, Firefox 3.1, Opera 10, Safari 4) will have so much compute power that a problem like my 100,000 row sorter will become easy and commonplace. Furthermore, the standards are even adding true background threads to support long-running compute operations. (The standard is based on the Google Gears implementation, which is already available.)
Do you not find it alarming that in this day and age, a program to sord 100,000 records is deemed impressive? On my machine (an eee 900):
time awk 'BEGIN{for(;;)print rand()}' | head -100000 | sort > /dev/null
Takes 0.7 seconds. By removing the stringification, and obvious inefficiencies,it would run much faster. In C++ is is easy to sort hundreds of millions of records in a very short amount of time using nothing more than std::sort and a suitable comparison function. The fact that in this area it is deemed impressive (and I have little doubt that it is) is a testament to a large step backwards.
Your other points stand, though.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Sure a lot of apps can be moved to a web interface. A lot of carpentry can also be done with a hacksaw. The question isn't "Can it be done?" but rather "Is this the best tool for the job?". For example I strongly believe a web app is an awful idea for an office suite. (Having non-sensitive documents stored and editable on the web may be a good idea depending on the application, but there's nothing wrong with using a standard format and using the appropriate document editor. Sure a web interface would give you consistent editing but the requirement that you're online and the speed at which a web app will work are a bigger disadvantage.)
Personally I don't find any of Joel's ramblings interesting anymore. He has a very skewed view. Some of what he says is just plain wrong. (He completely lost me when he posted about Bill Gates' arrogant behaviour in a hero worshipping tone. If you can't even recognise unprofessional behaviour when you see it your professional opinion means very little to me).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Well, that was the lamest collection of reasons I've ever seen.
It's client-server all over again? Umm. Yeah? So? Most enterprise applications are client-server. Include document and process management and your entire network is a gigantic client-server system. Come on. Is that supposed to scare anyone? Really? Wow. Should every employee have a browser? Hell yeah. If they have a computer they should have a browser. If you have a problem with your employees doing other stuff than work then you have a problem that won't go away because you take away the browser. That should be obvious to anyone who has ever been an employer.
And saying that the web is a place that is dominated by big players is just ludicrous when advocating working on the desktop instead. (I don't think I need to spell this one out for you)
No, this is all crap. There are valid reasons why certain applications shouldn't be web based. But the article lists none of these. Too much load on the datacenter. I mean seriously. Come on!
I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it -- Groucho Marx
Computers aren't like physical objects--they're vastly more configurable. Most users seem to value convenience and ease-of-use above all other attributes, and the way they've embraced webmail shows it. I'm not one of them, but that's the way users are going. Their definition of "best" is different than your definition of best.
Email is inherently suited to being a web based application. For a start retrieving and sending messages requires an Internet connection. Secondly, most email messages are just text and don't require fancy controls. (Where you need rich text, controls are still easily accomodated. Wher eyou need more, you use attachments for which funcitonality is also easily provided in a web app).
It doesn't matter how configurable a computer is. Web applications have limitations that desktop applications do not have (and to a lesser extent the opposite is also true). It really is a question of using the right tool for the job.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I hate crappy AJAX GUIs as much as everyone else, but I also know that writing a decent "offline" application in a suitable language takes at least one order of magnitude more effort - and that is before you attempt to implement some of the features every web app has naturally (automatic updating etc.).
It's convenient to rant about the stuff we use every day, but when was the last time *you* wrote and supported a non-web based, cross-platform application with GUI and had first hand experience with all the problems involved? Nowdays we're all spoilt web developers, aren't we ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)