Slashdot Log In
People Don't Hate to Make Desktop Apps, Do They?
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Mon Apr 09, 2007 10:32 PM
from the all-not-yet-lost dept.
from the all-not-yet-lost dept.
Annie Peterson writes "Paul Graham has been making the argument that desktop development is dead — That's his premise for declaring Microsoft dead as well, and he claims that no one out there likes to develop for the desktop anymore. But that's not true, or is it? Desktop development is easier, faster, more productive, and infinitely more enjoyable — right? The question is, since web apps were originally built on desktop applications themselves, have the tables flipped? Or is it just wishful thinking?"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Passe... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Passe... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Passe... (Score:5, Funny)
I did in '03, but then I lost my pencil.
Parent
the problem with google apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Then i'm glad i don't rely on ajax apps or anything to get work done. While corporate customers enjoy a level of reliability that the average home user doesn't even dream of, being chained to the internet, yes, being chained to hotspots or cell towers for mobile internet is a drawback that the average user can't consider.
While php and perl are great, people like to think they're somewhat self reliant, and relying on outside sources is good every so often, you don't hire consultants to do payroll for you.
The web apps are like consultants, you bring them in for activities that is too expensive to implement and are only needed for on demand, but you don't have them do mundane activities that you could hire someone full time and not lose money on.
Firefox 3.0 (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Firefox 3.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll believe it when I see it.
Sorry, I just can't be optimistic about this. You shouldn't be, either.
Look - today's web browsers can't even really get offline web page caching right. We're about a decade into the WWW revolution, yet browsers still can't passively save all of our web accesses and show 'em to us again when we're offline. I'd love to have my browser cache all of Slashdot's articles, and BoingBoing's, and Fark's links, for later offline browsing... yet it can't do that. The best we can get is RSS, which, frankly, is crap... it's like Gopher in HTML.
If browsers can't tackle the very simple task of caching routine HTML for offline access... what gives you confidence that it will cache complex AJAX applets with even minimal usability?
- David Stein
Parent
Re:Firefox 3.0 (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure why I should adjust my expectations to technology according to your misuse of technology.
Todays browsers don't get offline caching of Slashdot right, because Slashdot is an online application, and says so:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 12:48:30 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_perl/1.29
SLASH_LOG_DATA: 07/04/10/011220
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005000152
X-Fry: I don't regret this, but I both rue and lament it.
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Vary: User-Agent,Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
In order to read Slashdot offline "right", you need to break HTTP. And we all know what happens to naughty boys who breaks standards. [greenspun.com]
Offline webapplications will work offline because they will be designed to work offline. They will get safe caching of resources and a stateful browser-DOM-object to save data to. It's not exactly rocketscience.
Parent
Re:Firefox 3.0 (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
You make few assumptions which aren't always true (Score:4, Informative)
In particular, it seems a shame to pigeonhole Perl. Using Perl and readily available libraries, one can develop console programs, GUI programs, daemons, or web apps. With Tk, SDL, OpenGL, WxWidgets, curses, GTK, Win32::GUI, or Prima, few languages have as many options for interface libraries last I checked. Just because Perl is very useful for web development doesn't mean it's not useful in other areas.
In a fun twist, I had to develop an app that worked the same over the web or on a Windows desktop with no net connection and no installation. It's written in PHP and Perl with a little client-side JavaScript and runs an Apache+MySQL instance from CD. So it's a web app, but it doesn't require net access.
And BTW, ADP (American Data Processing) and similar companies makes a lot of money doing payroll for other companies.
Parent
Re:the problem with google apps (Score:5, Insightful)
True, having your apps - and data - locally stored is very helpful. I'm sensitive to that - every time MS Office insists on using "Office Online" for my help queries, I silently curse up a storm. It's a perfect example; this is a simple function that used to execute immediately.
But that's only one of a few really key advantages of desktop apps over web apps. I've spent a lot of time [djstein.com] designing a lot of apps (as a pro/am enthusiast), and here are just a few of the very many other reasons for preferring the desktop environment to the web environment:
Again, those are just a few issues. I can come up with a whole lot more.
Face it, people. Web programming is absolutely the future... but at present, it's still a toddler. Web 2.0 is the equivalent of a two-year-old: fussy, colicky, prone to outbursts and temper tantrums. And it's still teething, so when it misbehaves, you end up with bite marks.
I think it'll take a solid six years or so before web programming is as easy as desktop programming. Until then, I'll keep banging out apps for my "antiquated" desktop environment... with ease and a grin.
- David Stein
Parent
Re:the problem with google apps (Score:5, Insightful)
I sincerely hope you mean they're having trouble getting the code behind the button to work, because I'd be extremely worried about the state of web developers today if they can't write <input type="button" value="Text on the button face" onclick="functionCallHere()">
or a form consisting of only a submit button (if you're making it compatible with browsers that have no scripting or have scripting disabled).
The term web application is not often applied to Java any more. The term "web app" these days often refers to AJAX (formerly known as DHTML) apps and, less often, Flash apps.
However, you're right, on the whole desktop apps have better performance than web apps.
Which brings up another point not yet mentioned: The sad state of affairs with web application GUIs is almost entirely Microsoft's fault. IE6 and its rather poor support for CSS2 and DOM, which weren't addressed for 6 years, let alone fixed, coupled with its widespread use has made it the lowest common denominator.
Parent
Desktop app development (Score:5, Insightful)
Might be in the minority here.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I am asked quite often though, "Well why don't we just stick this on a web page and then we can get it from everywhere!" and I usually demur some and note that we dont need it to when anyone on the intranet can get to it anyway and there is no reason for some of these apps (or data) to be accessible outside of the corporate intranet.
For some reason, I just don't like ASP.Net or PHP or JavaScript, i've written small interactive web things in them, but it takes me way longer to accomplish something useful on a website than it does doing a desktop application. I suppose this probably has to do entirely with familiarity, but I also hate how slow websites typically are when you do something overly graphical or complex, whereas it runs great on the desktop application locally.
Browser as bad user interface (Score:4, Insightful)
iTunes is a dedicated desktop app that uses internet data intelligently, but Apple made a good choice not depending on a browser. Compare Google Maps to Google Earth, which is more responsive and flexible? And then there's the comparison of something like QuickTime or Windows Media players and the pseudo video players written in Flash with bad control responsiveness and limited functionality.
Parent
Re:Might be in the minority here.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Having said that, a web application will never have the level of control that a forms-based one has, no matter how fancy your JavaScript is. Truth is, the browser is a crappy platform no matter how you look at it. The web illuminati proclaimed the desktop dead ten years ago and now again on the tails of GMail and the half million good and bad "rich" applications developed apparently for the specific purpose of showcasing how utterly screwed up the browser as a platform is.
But if you work for a living you probably have to go with the flow, so "Ajax" it is until the next fad comes around. Personally I think Java/.NET/Mono and the like with a good forms front end and a really powerful matching backend infrastructure is going to be the next big thing along with XCOPY deployment and zero impact installs. CPUs and memory are catching up to managed frameworks and writing a web service (or a client) is laughably simple now (I remember hand-coding my WSDL and walking in the snow uphill both ways, etc).
In any case, the fun part is being int he middle of it all =)
Parent
People hate developing applications (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:People hate developing applications (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not even developing apps anymore. It's assembling apps from bits of prefab code. The kicker is that only some of it is good quality and can be picked up and mastered quickly.
These days, coding is grabbing some barely begun project that does just enough that you feel it's better to add to it than start fresh, using code generators (SWIG, yacc/lexx or Antlr, and doesn't VB have some wretched auto generated window manipulation stuff? etc.) then spending time ferreting out and fixing subtly broken bits or wondering if you missed some little detail about how to properly use the tools. Then maybe get another piece or two by running some Fortran source code thru f2c, call functions from lots of different libraries, grab some modules off cpan, try to realize the advanatages of OOP by reusing other people's classes, search Sourceforge again for yet more pieces, glue the crap together with shell scripts, and try to avoid dallying in makefile hell by dallying instead in automatic makefile generation hell. Constantly search the Internet for this and that error message.
And that's just "development". Then there's all kinds of support stuff to figure out. Wrestle with your choice of source repository be that cvs, subversion, rcs, or whatever, figure out what to set to what in the environment on stuff like Java's CLASSPATH, muck about with this and that IDE and try to get the compiler and debugger to talk nicely to it or live with vi when you get tired of trying to figure out why you're not having any luck getting X to tunnel through ssh. Either way figure out how to twiddle the colors for the syntax highlighting or squint to make out those letters that were displayed in dark blue on a black background. Bone up on emacs to figure out how to get it to stop replacing backspace with ctrl-h, and binding ctrl-h to the help when being used remotely. Repeat "./configure;make;make install a library or 2, discover they depend on yet other libraries" until "all dependencies satisfied or you run up against some missing or broken piece and will have to search for alternatives." And still you're not done. How about Valgrind? Profiling? Maybe some kind of package to automate testing? Automated backups of the work? And you're never really done-- there are always upgrades, and there's always deciding when the tradeoff of having to redo your environment is worth the bug fixes, new features, and so on.
Life was so much simpler when they were teaching that bubble sort in the beginning C class, wasn't it?
Parent
I don't see desktop apps ever going away entirely. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like when Java came out and some people said we'd never write C again. There are things Java is good for and has taken over, just as there are things web apps are good for and has taken over, but there is still a place for desktop apps just as there is still a place for C.
The kind of bold, sweeping statements made by this article aren't much more than flamebait in a pretty dress.
Give Me The Desktop (Score:5, Insightful)
I develop two things for a living. I work on a server back-end, and on the web front-end. The back end is easy. It's all Java, it's fun to develop for (there is challenge in some things, for example).
Then there are tons of front-end things I do. I hate them. It's developing the same code OVER and OVER (since we basically make copies of some parts to be used numerous times) and the glue code always has to go in there and is a pain. Then there is the scripting. Besides making things display right (which is a pain across numerous browsers), there is the functionality. "We want a select all checkbox." "When you update this date, it should update that date, unless this date is before than date except when...". Javascript is HIDEOUS. Can we just replace it with Python or Java even PHP?
Our problems are all user based. The users want it to work like a desktop application, but want it to be web based. It should respond fast and do all this checking and such, but it can't be a real application. You should be able to move forward and backwards without things going weird (can be tough to do in the stateless-ness of the web) but it can't be a real application.
We want an application, but we want it to be web based. We want it fast, but it must be made in HTML and Javascript. Blah blah blah.
I would LOVE to do more desktop applications. I wish I could.
I wish users would get over this stupid "lets put everything on the web" stuff. There is a fair amount of what we do that I can see being web based (like most of the reporting type stuff external users use). But all the management stuff we use in house would be a much better fit to a real application than the web applications we are using now.
Please, PLEASE.... bring desktop applications into vogue. Java allows right-once-run-anywhere to just as high a degree as HTML/JavaScrpit, if not more. Takes less bandwidth. Can run much faster. Can do client side stuff easier.
Re:Give Me The Desktop (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't copy code: You generalize it into a function.
Parent
Re:Give Me The Desktop (Score:4, Insightful)
Trust me, just wait a little while, and desktop applications will be all the rage again. If you've been in the computer business long enough, you've seen the shift from "timeshare" server, to the desktop, back to server (thin client), back to desktop, back to server (Java), back to desktop, back to server (web applications / ajax, web 2.0). It's only a matter of time until the pendulum swings back to desktop.
Parent
Web apps are great, except... (Score:5, Insightful)
Web apps are great, except...:
Why not just leave the web to things that require the Internet and keep applications on the PC?
Re:Web apps are great, except... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because DOWNLOAD and INSTALL are two words that make too many users pass out upon hearing them uttered. If an IT Department is doing both of these tasks on their behalf, they too faint when they have 1,000+ users.
Do you have the right OS? Right version? The right drivers? Is your antivirus interfering? Is your Registry befuddled?
It's much easier to answer these questions once -- for the browser software -- and be done. Need to upgrade? NO PROBLEM! Upgrade on the servers only and we're off.
Now I'm sure EVERY ONE of my above arguments can be refuted, drowned with "gotchyas", banged with exceptions, and slammed with a "not exactly" or two. But I'm not the one that needs convincing. Convince management, cuz they are brainwashed that all my above points are Irrefutable Law of Common Wisdom. It's an uphill battle to show them otherwise. They are completely sold on the Browser as Platform concept. And that's where their pocketbooks go. So that's where commercial dev shops go.
I'm not saying webapps are without any merit, but, yes, people tend to go overboard and shove a square peg in a round hole.
Parent
It's not hate, it's headaches. (Score:5, Informative)
Tech support sucks big time. It's far, far, far easier to maintain, upgrade, distribute a web application than it is to manage a desktop application. A couple major web browsers and a couple major plugins pretty much covers every testing and support situation that you will face -- especially for intranet type situations.
For desktop situations there are a million variables: installers, bugs, spyware, permissions, operating systems and versions of OSs, non-existent user backups, differing service pack and patch levels... the list goes on. Most of these really aren't your problem as a software developer or publisher, but in reality, they often become your problem. That's in addition to the nightmare of supporting different versions of your program.
If the web can be applied to a situation, there should be no surprise that people will develop for the web.
Re:The real growth is embedded/mobile (Score:4, Informative)
Parent