
Are Web Interfaces "Good Enough"? - jcwentz
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000815.html
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lupin_sansei
"Ajax improves the experience a lot, but it has limits and I suspect we've
already seen most of the tricks that Ajax is going to offer."

This will be the new "640k ought to be enough for everyone"

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pg
Yes, I agree with you there. Never estimate what hackers can do.

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mattculbreth
This is a good post. I especially like the conversation around Eckel's point
about Flash perhaps being better suited for Web apps than DHTML/JS. I can't
really put my finger on it very well, but Flash apps just don't feel real. I
never really get the sense that I'm the one controlling the application.

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jwecker
I know the feeling. The same feeling I had back when people were still writing
java applets. Maybe a normal user doesn't feel it- maybe it's the programmer
in us knowing that there's a big layer running between me and the browser...

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e1ven
Certainly a good read-

While I tend to be a bit of a details oriented person when it comes to UI, the
most important aspect is reducing friction to the user.

If a user has to go to your website, download a plugin, wait for it to
install, restart their browser, and then go back, you're going to lose them.
This is the same problem when it comes to downloading an application. You want
to make it as easy as possible to get things going, as quickly as possible.

Ajax gives users this- Flash is useful, and with Flex may gain inrodes into
whole-application development, but It's still hairy- While flash is installed
in a huge portion of desktops, most of them have old versions..

Using it also ties you to technology owned by a company other than you. This
is a key point- Look what Adobe has done with Acrobat- It's a great format,
but for YEAR it got slower with each revision.. If this happens with Flash,
there's nothing you can do about it. It's a closed standard, and you don't own
it.

At least with browsers, users have a choice of implementation..

Adding Flash adds a layer of abstration- Each time you do that, you lose a bit
of control.

I'd rather use a Ajax toolkit like GWT- Even if Google screws up, it's OSS,
and I can fork from the version that worked well for me.

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far33d
e1ven: have you used GWT? Any reactions/feelings about it? The debugging
environments seem particularly appealing (especially for me - I'm a (very)
experienced programmer, but not w/ web apps..

Also interesting is that while you could fork a version, since it compiles to
JS and HTML, you could always just hack up the results when the going got
really tough.

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e1ven
I've done a VERY small amount with GWT, but I've been reading the Mailing List
since the announcement.. I plan on using it in the next project, but I don't
have the Experience yet.

Beyond the fact that it's open, there's also that you can tie in other JS
libs- So you have a lib you really like, you can import it's functions into
JS, and use them as part of your application.

And while I agree that you could hack up the HTML/JS, that'd get really hairy
for complex stuff- Although I think some people are doing that now to break
things up better into modules.

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far33d
Hacking the compiled code, would, as always be a last resort..

