On 10/12/2013 06:39 AM, Wolfgang Keller wrote:
Certainly not. Not to mention the issue of end-user productivity. Not
to mention the deployment mess, both server- *and* client-side, with
"web apps". Etc. and so on...
Five years ago I would have agreed with you totally. Web applications
where useless for serious data entry. Today I am on the fence for two
reasons.
1) My primary career for many years has involved
construction/maintenance work. In the course of said work I have spent
many hours at the counters of wholesale vendors placing orders. My
observation has been that as the vendors moved from text --> GUI --> Web
applications the counter personnel productivity has decreased. With the
old text applications I could rattle off a list of items and quantities
and the data person could enter them in real time. At the end I would
say 'done', they would hit print, I would take a few sips of coffee
while the order printed, we would go pick the order. The only
improvement I see with the new software is I get to drink more coffee as
I often get to sip between items as latency has increased.
2) Per previous comments in this thread the market is demanding Web
competency in app development. To that end I have been pushing myself up
that learning curve. Just this morning I finished a form driven by
Django using javascript/JQuery and backed by Postgres. In that form I
have an autocomplete field that derives its values from an array
populated by a database query. On selection of an entry in that field I
use the id associated with that entry to pull more information from the
database and populate other fields in the form. I quite pleased with the
snappiness of the response, granted this all done locally, though it is
going through the Django development server which makes no claims to
being speedy.
Development of said Web form involved quite a few moving parts. Learning
the parts was time consuming, learning to get them to exchange
information correctly even more so. The whole process would have taken
even longer where I not standing on the shoulders of better developers
them me, i.e Django for a database driven Web framework, JQuery to take
some of the ugliness out of Javascript.
Conclusion:
I agree with you to an extent that Web development is oversold.
I disagree that it is totally useless, there is promise.
P.S:
As to your examples of Web apps, web mailers, forums, etc, I would say
Caveat emptor . There is no such thing as 'free'. Most of the apps you
mention serve a dual purpose, one to provide the service specified, read
email for example, second to provide a source of customers to the
provider from which they can derive some monetary benefit. To serve that
second purpose they are cluttered with code, screen elements that really
do not have anything to do with the first purpose.
Sincerely,
Wolfgang
--
Adrian Klaver
adrian.klaver@xxxxxxxxx
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