On 3/27/07, Peter Childs <peterachilds@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Strangely the in-house application is often still the better way to go. The web can make everything 3 times more complicated than it needs to be. Toolkits like GWT help this but you still need to write "middleware" even when you can trust the trust the end user. Hence most places still use in-house applications except the VB or Delphi gets replaced with Ruby or Python. Here we use C++ and Qt but thats another story.
I agree with everything you said except the point about the GWT. Using a framework like this you can have your query in the javascript, and pass it through directly the database and pass the data back using extremely simple (think 10 line) php or perl rpc that renders query result back in json to the browser. In fact, you can write, compile, and debug the app in java which is great advantage of gwt (imo). Of course, this is not an appropriate way of writing an application over untrusted network but otoh, is....very RAD. What you get is the limitation of working through the browser but you can kiss goodbye to deployment headaches that plague classic thick client apps because the runtime is 100% contained in the browser rendering engine and some mighty .js files. With a little bit of clever programming you can get proper binding if you prefer that type development. merlin
