Re: Front-end Driven Applications

On 10/1/2014 4:26 PM, Matt Olson wrote:

The article talks about the vast majority of the program logic running on the users PC, rather than the backend. "front-end driven" is just another term that means thick/fat/rich client just as the author of that article points out. Although he is trying to differentiate it from that by saying it's slightly different then a thick/fat/rich client in that it requires NO custom back-end. The problem is, there has to be a back-end somewhere that is serving up data. But the authors distinction is that "What is new is not owning the backend at all". I'm sorry, at this point this article is just idiotic, I'm the custodian of my data, it isn't available anywhere but my own backend server.

I don't think that we, developers for private companies, were the
audience. The way I read it, there are so many back-end APIs that you
could basically script your front-end to be the glue that ties all those
APIs together. If you wanted a dashboard for your executive types,
you'd call
get_stock_ticker('IBM')
get_weather('Rochester, MN')
get_customer_count('Northeast')

...and so on. Some of those APIs would be public (weather.gov,
nyse.com) and some would be built by your own company. All the replies
would come back as JSON or XML and rendered by the front end's
JavaScript libraries.

I also don't see this as the 5250 paradigm. The 5250 is a classic block
mode, unit record machine. Like an MFCU with a display.
--buck