Re: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>]

> 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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