Archives
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More Evidence of the Importance of Smart Clients
"Six Apart Ltd.'s TypePad blog hosting service went down for the day last Friday following a failed storage upgrade. Affected customers included Major League Baseball's MLB.com site, which hosts all of its blogs with TypePad. In addition, the del.icio.us bookmark-sharing service that Yahoo Inc. just bought suffered days of problems last week after its data center lost power." -- Infoworld.
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SalesForce.com Proves why "Offline" Capability is So Important
SalesForce.com is a hugely popular web based CRM application boasting more than 350,000 subscribers. They are also often touted as an example of the resurgence of Internet based applications and are the poster child for the mythical "Web 2.0". But like other strictly browser based applications they have a rather significant flaw; they require connectivity at all times.
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Gentleman, Prepare to Click-Once!
In Rob's summary of the story thus far, he further "refines" the criteria for our bet to include that the application be installed via Click-Once. While this may be a tough criteria to meet given the current FUD about installing the .NET Framework, I'll take that challenge. Okay Rob, you're on! Who's with me?!?!
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The Web App/Smart Client Discussion Continues
Since posting my response to Rob's blog in the wee hours this morning I've gotten some pretty good feedback including a response from Rob himself asking me to "Show Him The Money" pointing out that nobody is doing smart clients, at least for consumers. Before I get into that though, let me try to dispell another web application myth.
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No Rob, Dumb Terminals are a Dumb Idea
My friend and colleague Rob Howard recently posed the question on his blog, “Are Smart Clients a Dumb Idea?” In his post he recanted his earlier statements regarding the adoption of smart clients and now is convinced that web based applications written with the magic of AJAX are indeed the future. In this post, I hope to bring him, and the rest of the AJAX Hip-Mo-Tized world back to some semblance of reality.
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How to Start a New Web 2.0 Company
While doing a bit of reading in preparation for a rather lengthy blog post I'm working on I found this hilarious site that lets you generate your own VC friendly company name and product. I'm pretty sure this is what the Vonage guys used to come up with their spiffy new name.
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Microsoft’s “Live” Services – The Power is in Smart Clients, not AJAX
There has been quite a bit of noise lately over Microsoft’s recent “Live Services” announcement, most of which was caused by Microsoft’s choice to use AJAX, a cutting edge technology if you happen to be stuck in 1998. Those of us currently residing in reality, also known as the end of 2005, remember that client-side Javascript is more browser slight-of-hand than an architecture on which to build enterprise applications. But the fanfare went on and the browser addicts once again felt justified in killing off usability in the name of a myth called “ease of deployment”. Even Rob Howard, a generally very smart guy, is ready to call for the end of Smart Clients. But if you take a closer look at the functionality of Microsoft’s Live Services what you’ll find is that the real power comes from Smart Clients, not AJAX.