Delphi - desktop, Web, or USB?

The thread below - 'So long and thanks for all the fish' - has drifted somewhat off topic, and in particular gone into the area of "what should Delphi be targeting?".

I've argued that Win32/64 has a long future, and nobody other than CodeGear has a credible RAD tool for it. I said that .Net ISN'T always the answer, and that Win32 is - and will remain - a very viable platform. Therefore CodeGear ought to "leverage" (ugh) this unique selling point and market the hell out of it.

Brian Moelk disagrees:

IMO, internet applications have and will continue to replace quite a few
of them. Email and office applications can been replaced for smaller
corporations and I believe we'll see that trend continue.

The thing is, they all have to be hosted in a browser, and that means the inevitable "lowest common denominator" user interface.

Either that, or they run as separate Java programs, again with the usual hideous interface.

I've used both, and had some fun with the various Google bits and bobs, and although they will get the job done, they are annoyingly slow at times, and have a distinctly clunky (almost Windows 3.1) look and feel to them. The richest, slickest user interface is still to be had when using a real OS such as Vista or Mac OSX. At least, that is my observation.

I'd like to explore and understand this a bit further. The implication of this line of argument is that the multiple gigabytes of Vista and Mac OSX are completely unnecessary - all you need is a Web browser and an ultra-light kernel to host it on - something to look after the screen, keyboard and mouse clicks. Everything else can be done from within the browser, using Java to provide the programmatic stuff (or use some server-side processing), and Flash or Silverlight for the UI. Presumably you could make an Office 2007 clone like this? Or a Photoshop look- and work-alike? A Windows Media Player replacement?

That seems hard to believe. Have Microsoft and Apple (and the Linux crowd) made a dreadful mistake and written tens of millions of lines of code that aren't actually needed? When all they needed to do was write a browser and a lightweight kernel to generate the screen display and catch the key strokes?

It just seems too simple.

Brian goes on to describe yet another model:

IMO, the future here is not in traditional desktop model, but rather the
USB/Portable one. The registry, COM and program "installations" are
conceptual dinosaurs. There are no real technical and very few business
reasons not to treat PC's as generic "host" systems for applications
that each person carries around with them. I have run my
email/newsreader off a USB drive for a long time now and will never go
back to an installed email client.

Something doesn't add up. I'm puzzled. Just how much of the 25GB of software on my hard disk can be ditched and delivered through IE and a Java engine? Just how realistic is it to run an application like Word 2007, or Photoshop, from a USB stick on any computer you happen to be near, without touching the registry or "installing" anything?

Clearly I don't understand all the issues, but I think the discussion is valuable. Was the all-singing all-dancing OS model - as in Windows, OSX and Unix - a dreadful mistake? Are Web-hosted applications going to make serious inroads into the domain of the traditional Windows desktop applications? Can we realistically carry our applications around with us on a USB stick?

Maybe by getting some insights into these areas we can identify where we think Delphi could develop and flourish.

SteveT

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Relevant Pages

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