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July 11, 2005
Web Apps' (Current) Advantages Over Fat Clients
I've been doing a bunch of thinking lately about how people use web applications, fat clients, and the blurring of the line between the two. In particular, I've been focussing on mail readers, in part because I work on one, and in part because it's an area where both web apps and fat clients have very significant market share. A big reason that web mail clients are so popular these days is that they provide a set of features that fat clients often overlook.
Notable ones include:
* automatic configuration - after you create or login to your account, no extra configuration is necessary to begin using it. No need to know what an SMTP or an IMAP server is, let alone which ones your ISP happens to need or what sort of authentication options have to be chosen.
* continuous, automatic incremental upgrading - much of the time when the app needs to be updated to a new version, it's just done on the server without even bothering to warn the user, since there's no preparation, reinstall or any other action necessary. Furthermore, since it's so cheap to deploy an update, that makes it much easier to incrementally implement and deploy new features rather than just having occasional major releases.
* config data location independence - if you've customized your preferences in any significant way, in a web app, those customizations are sticky: they are simply done. Whatever machine you access the app from, you never need to enter it again.
* accessible from any machine with a suitable web browser - there's no real install step necessary.
In order to continue to be competitive, it's my belief that fat clients need to do a significantly better job at providing the set of features listed above. My next blog entry will be about my suspicion that by adding a small set of things onto XULRunner, Mozilla-the-platform will be able to make it easy for fat clients to provide many of the key features in web applications that people have come to depend on.
Posted by dmose at July 11, 2005 10:56 AM
Comments
There are some notable disadvantages to webApps:
- privacy/security - it's often harder to secure a webappt han a fat client.
- perminance - enterprises often don't want to pay for a service that could potentially go under and leave them in a bad position. When you have the installer CD, your much more protected
- licensing - if I have the binary, you normall y can't just raise the prices on me (unless it's something like an AOL client).
- hardware integration - webApps have to live in a sandbox. It's hard for them to do some things.
- performance - i'd like to see UT2k5 run as a web client. Some things are too big to stream. Games being the #1 example. Fat clients can provide when it comes to large volumes of data. A Ford Econoline still has more bandwidth than any networking technology currently available.
Posted by: Robert Accettura at July 11, 2005 3:14 PM