[fpc-pascal] Creating FPC enabled websites

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Prince Riley wrote:

> Joost
> 
> Reading the responses on this discussion thread, it appears the 'religious
> war' you mentioned in your prior post was unavoidable.
> 
> Not to add any fuel to the warring opinions I'd like answer  a comment you
> made in response to my response.
> 
> The recent push to make web applications (not simply web browsing) perform
> more like desktop  applications has been the primary driver behind the Web
> 2.0 and the improved Javascript engines by Google and the Mozilla people.
> They have their own commercial motivations for those improvements, the
> primary driver has been the software application developers who want web
> apps to perform like desktop ones.
> 
> While several traditional "desktop" application scenarios do still exists
> that will likely always run directly on the O/S without a web client front
> end, the direction of most major software application development efforts
> I've witnessed in the past three years have all targeted migrating the
> desktop GUI over to a web browser. Others in the discussion thread have
> referenced several reasons for this shift already, but the trends continue
> to follow the idea of pushing as much of the presentation and processing
> layers onto the remote web browser.
> 
> Finally, respectfully I must disagree with your comments that the
> applications deployment approach " is only true for small
> applets used by a broad public. " ignores the TOC and other economies of
> scale afforded by portable web applications. Scott Trade and TD Ameritrade
> are just two of several examples where sophisticated trading desk and
> customer centric web-based applications are running on 100,000s of web
> browsers. Just a few years ago these same applications were shipped  to
> clients and had to be installed and run on their desktop PCs.

Well, drop by and I'll prove to you - hands down - that what our clients need
simply cannot be done by web applications, because they cannot interact with
the local desktop. Can your web-app burn a CD-ROM ? Does it have access to
a smartcard reader ? Can it start and control MS-Word ? Can you drop files
on it to send to the server ? I thought not, unless maybe you develop in Java, 
and then you are back in C/S...

And finally: can these apps work offline with NO internet connection ? 
I don't think so.

Web apps: by all means, but not for every possible scenario...

Michael.