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."

Comments

... and so what?

[ThousandStars]

Those all might true, but so what? The advantages outweigh the disadvantages, and web apps are improving all the time. Paul Graham already wrote about the issue in The Other Road Ahead, and Joel Spolsky wrote about them in How Microsoft Lost the API War. He enumerates problems and things that, at the time of the article, you couldn't do with web apps:

Create a fast drawing program
Build a real-time spell checker with wavy red underlines
Warn users that they are going to lose their work if they hit the close box of the browser
Update a small part of the display based on a change that the user makes without a full roundtrip to the server
Create a fast keyboard-driven interface that doesn't require the mouse
Let people continue working when they are not connected to the Internet

These are not all big issues. Some of them will be solved very soon by witty Javascript developers. Two new web applications, Gmail and Oddpost, both email apps, do a really decent job of working around or completely solving some of these issues. And users don't seem to care about the little UI glitches and slowness of web interfaces. Almost all the normal people I know are perfectly happy with web-based email, for some reason, no matter how much I try to convince them that the rich client is, uh, richer.

And these issues shrink all the time. I agree with Joel regarding rich clients--I use Mail.app for e-mail, but virtually no one else I know does. Photoshop and Final Cut Pro aren't moving to the web anytime in the short to medium term, but other apps will, and it's hard to see this guy's ideas mattering. Sure, they might be true, but the web is still more convenient. For me, it's become a central repository for book and other commentary in the form of The Story's Story and write about grant writing at Grant Writing Confidential. Yeah, I write my posts in Textmate, but most people don't--and most people aren't going to buy and install Textmate.