Re: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

Joe Pluta wrote:
Or look at any of the great examples of "rich client" interfaces, starting
with Microsoft Outlook Web Access.
XUL is another great rich client interface, as is the Open Source ThinWire
middleware: http://www.thinwire.com/.

Thinwire's demo site seems to be down this morning, but I will look more into 
it later.  Google's Windowing Toolkit, and a number of other browser based UI 
frameworks are quite impressive too.

Things like this would probably keep IBM from gaining much ground if they were 
to develop a proprietary native GUI for the System i.

Even Microsoft's Web Forms framework, which is integrated into ASP .Net seems 
to be dated, in comparison.  The whole idea of a framework of finely-grained 
server-based UI widgets that render themselves as HTML seems obsolete.  I don't 
know how much money Microsoft put into it, but it could have easily been $100 
million.

On the other hand, I also question UI frameworks which implement a boat load of 
JavaScript.  This is often reflected in amount of time it takes to download the 
application in the browser.  I wouldn't consider myself a JavaScript expert, 
and downloading a boat load of script to the client seems to be going too far 
into the realm of fat clients.

For now, I'm taking a middle ground approach of using Dreamweaver to design 
HTML templates, mixed with a relatively small amount of JavaScript to make them 
come alive, so to speak.

Nathan.





 
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