Thursday, February 14, 2013

will we abandon mobile applications

Today most of the java applications has web UI interface and not rich client application. It is almost a curse to develop a rich client application that run on the client side. In one of the projects that i did in a very big enterprise company i herd one of the managers says: I do not wont to install anything on the user machine, only anti virus and OS. No doubt, web UI has a lot of advantages and today with HTML5 you can get rich client application look & feel in your web browser. so it looks very reasonable to abandon rich client technologies like swing and use web development instead. and with tools like GWT it looks very easy to work in web development and you don't have to work with java script if you don't like it. However, today we are facing a very big revolution, the mobile revolution we are replacing our computers and laptops with mobile phones and tablets. But in this world we would like to install applications on our device! even if we write it in java script we wrap it in installation, why? there are probably a lot of answers: 1. very easy to install 2. can use the app store / Google play for earn money and promotions 3. better user experience 4. better performance 5. more capabilities from the device hardware (GPS,jyro...) let me answer it one by one: 1. install on desktop is also quite easy 2. This is an advantage but i ask myself is it a silver bullet? 3. also in desktop 4. also in desktop 5. many applications that don't need extra from the hardware still used as applications. more than that i suspect that the factors that made us abandon rich client and focus on web still exist in mobile slow the computer viruses security and many more... so do you think one day we will stop using applications and return to the web again?

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