Re: Delphi roadmap from the .NET perspective...
- From: "Shawn B." <leabre@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:39:39 -0800
Sure, there are many web sites that have code behind them, exchanging
data with a database, no doubt. But I see them as websites with
intelligence, not necessarily as web-based apps, i.e. apps that are
browser-based INSTEAD OF being desktop-based.
No, this is not a humpty-dumpty argument, IMO. There is IMO a big
difference between websites that have obtained some intelligence and
applications that have been made to work in browser, for, say
cross-platform purposes.
www.salesforce.com is one major well-known app that comes to mind. It very
easily could be a Delphi app. But by your definition, no web app can be
something like a desktop app. I view a desktop app as some intelligence
with a visual presentation and connection to the user. I also view web apps
with some intelligence and presentation and connection to the user. Maybe
one day Photoshop can run in a browser using something like WPF or
Silverlight but hardly HTML/Javascript. But applications like MS Money are
actually browser applications. They may not run via the internet but they
are HTML/Code behind kind of model where the nature of code is unimportant,
they are HTML and hosted browser. Intuit Quickbooks is the same way. I've
seen a few web apps that, too, are written in C++ but serve up HTML off a
webserver.
I've worked on a few that aren't well known to the masses, but are
incredibly complex, use many different technologies in such ways that its
amazing (or was amazing at the time) that was accomplished through a
browser, and are incredibly successful in their respective markets but they
all require relationship-type agreements and are heavily controlled by user
accounts and so on. They aren't something you'll just browse to and use or
download and install.
However, web apps really can't be in essence wait a desktop application is.
Desktop applications are distributed more or less and can just be installed
and used for the most part. They have the distinct ability to do
interesting things (heavy number crunching, ai, 3d graphics, media
processing) that web apps will have a very hard time doing with current
technology. So web apps are used for different types of things but can be
equally as successful or more so than your average desktop application.
Technologies like WPF and Silverlight might be able to change that because
XAML can be streamed such that, in newer (future) versions of Virtual
PC/VMWare will be able to render the presentation of WPF locally with full
hardware acceleration while the logic remains remote. That is because only
the updated XAML tags/commands are streamed quite efficiently and not entire
regions of bitmap areas on the screen. Once that becomes common place, we
might see a very different type of web application. But then, that depends
on your definition of a web. I'm going to say something that you can browse
to online using the http:// protocol over an active internet connection with
an average web browser (IE, Firefox, Safari) on an average platform (Linux,
Windows, OS X) regardless if its HTML or XAML or whether it requires a
special plugin. If its generally internet based via web browsers, its a web
app. Photoshop can easily be replicated with XAML (and potentially
Silverlight) but that remains to be seen if someone does it.
Thanks,
Shawn
.
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