Never send an HTML hacker to do a developer’s job
Web 2.0/AJAX complicates, not simplifies, substantial application development and porting projects There are few things more frustrating than filling out the last page of a four-page form on what purports to be a Web application, pressing Submit (or, if the site really fancies itself to be an app, Save), and getting “Server failure–try again later,” a SQL error sloppily spewed out to my browser, or “You are not connected to the Internet.” That last one is a problem on my end, sure, but it’s the site owner’s responsibility to deal with any failure condition gracefully. When I get the site back, my session has timed out for my protection, and I have to start over. That’s when I know that this would-be app was designed by someone who has never written a commercial client/server application, and that realization causes me to lose all faith in whatever services this erstwhile app purports to provide. That outfit lost my business for failing to understand the huge difference between a site and an application. I wish this were an isolated occurrence, but organizations are going ape over the promise of apps that deliver the desktop experience while running entirely on a server, zero… READ MORE