RE: What do I use?

From: Paul Raulerson

I was not speaking of comparing a System36 green screen app visually
to a Web App, I was thinking in terms of how clunky it was to design
a sophisticated System36 screen. It is just clunky to design a web
interface right now - everything is a workaround. :)

Hmmm. For business applications, I see HTML as being every bit as powerful
as a 5250 screen. If you're talking about the ease of creating a screen via
SDA, then you might want to take a look at EGL. It's very much SDA for the
browser.

And comparing a 5250 interface to a web app isn't the right
comparison either; compare a modernized web app to a custom crafted
standalone application. Even spreading the comparison across Windows,
MacOS, and X applications, we find the users are 3 to 1 in favor of
the standalone application. Of course, like you, we are not sampling
the entire spectrum of users, just the ones we sell to. :)

I don't think anybody's arguing that a thick client doesn't look better than
a thin client, be it 5250 or browser. However, if you take any one hundred
RPG shops, I bet there aren't five that have the skills and infrastructure
to properly build and maintain a single thick client application (much less
the multiple applications most businesses need). On the other hand, I can
teach any RPG developer enough JSP and Java to build powerful web
applications in a couple of days.

And that's without even getting into the issue of deployment. It's nearly
impossible to install thick clients on anything but your own intranet; as we
move farther along the road to extranets and B2C applications, thick client
simply becomes more difficult.

The alternative, of course, is rich client, which the Eclipse project is
doing quite well. I expect that we'll be seeing a lot more rich client
capability from IBM very soon now.

The only people who don't like the web are heads-down data entry
clerks, and
they're absolutely right; for them it's better.

Surprisingly enough (even or perhaps, especially to me...) this has
not proved true either. A well grafted GUI interface works ever bit
as well as green screen for data entry clerks and high volume
transaction processing. When implemented as a stand alone app that
is; when implemented as a web app, it is usually too sluggish for the
users. That was surprising to me, to say the least, but we have
pretty much managed to prove it, even to ourselves.

It's got nothing to do with sluggish; we regularly create web apps with 100
millisecond response time. Ten screens a second is fast enough for just
about anyone. No, the problem is in the fact that the browser has no
inherent typeahead capability, and heads-down data entry requires that. No
matter how fast you get the screen back, the real power users are going to
be hitting keys before you're done.

<grin> With users inserting video and graphics into Word documents,
sound clips into spreadsheets, and programmers depending upon context
sensitive help in editors these days...

Not a business application. Document processing is, and always will be, a
different animal from transaction processing.

Perhaps this is so, but I don't really find browsers are up to
handling working the way I want to just yet. That may be nothing more
than a symptom of workstations that are too slow though, I ;ll grant
you that. But still, programming a web application is much more
difficult than a comparable standalone application.

And I adamantly disagree. As I said, I can teach an RPG programmer how to
develop a browser application in days, whereas teaching someone the
event-driven nature of a true thick client is sometimes impossible. I
delivered commercial thick client applications, I'm pretty comfortable with
the issues.

I agree with you on that, I just think that the applications we will
be seamlessly downloading will provide more of the user interface
than will the browser. I am making a prediction that the browser as
we know it today will become indistinguishable from the OS before all
that much longer - something more like an X Server, that applications
load into and take control of.

Actually, I predict the Eclipse rich client UI (RCP) will be the next step
in the UI evolution. IBM is already merging Eclipse and it's Lotus
platforms to provide powerful rich client applications. We'll see that
trend continue. The only question will be whether we'll see an ANSI-like
standard for rich clients, or whether we'll continue to wobble along with
these senseless browser wars.

Joe