As part of my ChallengeMap experiment, I had my first contact with the wonderful world of web applications. Recently, I stumbled upon an example that just amazed me: WWW SQL Designer, a graphical design tool for SQL schemas. Check out the demo!
Yes, it’s rough around the edges. There’s missing functionality. Still, the ability to do this in a web app is simply amazing.
The interesting part is seeing this in the context of the discussions a couple of years ago – the thin-client/thick-client debate. Namely, the thin-client opponents claim that the web would never be an application platform and that people would never give up the power of desktop applications.
Turns out that people didn’t give up that power, and yet we still get web-based applications. There’s a host of very powerful applications out there now: Gmail, Basecamp, Writely, you name it. All web based, yet offering almost the same amount of power desktop applications bring – and all the benefits of server based applications, too. Now if somebody solves the problem of working offline….
Either way, I’ll continue exploring the webapp space both from a user and a programmer perspective throughout the year. And hopefully, I’ll find a few interesting tidbits to share with you.
Ugh. WWW SQL Designer is cool. But I could not imagine debugging and developing that UI code in Javascript/CSS/DHTML. Maybe I still don’t have enough experience writing complex client side scripts. I think Java may have been ahead of it’s time with the Applet paradigm. Maybe now that broadband is a little more common, AJAX is a widely supported technology, and CPU speed is way up, we’ll see Applets make a comeback. I sure like the thought of just using a JListBox with a custom renderer plugged in as opposed to creating all that crap with divs, DOM, and Javascript!
Thankfully, there are quite a few Ajaxian frameworks by now that take care of all of that nonsense. I’m sure you know most of them yourself, but my article-sense is tingling
My personal prediction is that Javascript is here to stay – it’s more accessible than Java. Most average Joe’s can do at least some of it, so more people will use that over a less accessible technology like Java. And then there’s the effort to have standardized controls to become part of HTML, spearheaded by Apple and the Mozilla guys.
No, I think Java for Webapps is dead. Killed by Suns stubbornness and the nightmare of debugging for every VM known to mankind. (Granted, we now debug for every browser known to mankind, but we have to do that anyways…)
I agree Javascript has a very good and permanent place on the client side. I use it all the time. But doing anything more complicated than an AJAX request to dynamically populate a drop down menu or showing a div, it starts feeling very kludgey and hacky. Even with CSS, it feels like HTML is being pushed to it’s design limits. Kind of like driving the doughnut spare tire at 70MPH. Think about how easy it would be to draw those lines between the SQL tables if you have direct access to the graphics context. I couldn’t even easily locate where he was doing it in the Javascript code.
For what it’s worth, Java is awesome (and still very popular) for the server side.
FYI, a prototype for an AJAX-based online/offline wiki: http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000272.html
It’s not a full solution, but it shows that supporting disconnected operations in web applications is possible. This approach still takes a lot of work and needs to be improved, but it shows some promise.