Hi

Have you looked at General Interface from www.tibco.com?

Simon


>Also you might want to look at http://www.zkoss.org/.
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>And don't forget about morfik!
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>
>>Hi Viv
>>
>>>Conversely, what if you have no internet connection? No way will a web-based application work in those circumstances :-}
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>>Of course it will. Take a look at Google Gears, as just one example. The old "no internet connection" chestnut is valid for an ASP.Net, JSP type of application where you need a server connection for the server to dish up the next page. Modern web-based rich-UI development tends to avoid this.
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>>>But, for the sake of argument assume that there is an interent connection available to both of you. I've yet to see a browser based UI that comes even close to providing the look-and-feel of a winforms based app.
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>>I've gotta say that winforms apps look "old hat". There are many fine examples of great UIs developed using Ajax and then there are frameworks like SproutCore and Cappucino/Objective-J that give the Mac "Cocoa" UI straight into the browser. Just like your Mac application straight off a Leopard desktop in the browser.
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>>>New .NET versions don't occur that often - and, of course, there's no obligation to start using them. But, given the specified internet connection, then the .NET version can be updated transparently, as can the application itself, using MS Click-once.
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>>There is no obligation to start using the next version of .NET but if you want to use the latest and greatest features, ergo, Link, WPF, WCF and so, you have to use the latest and greatest version. This isn't going to work when you have a goodly portion of your user base running Win2K and they can therefore only run .NET 2.0. To tell these people that they need WinXP SP2+ or worse still Vista, means a new desktop machine. Commercially, this sucks.
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>>>Surely this type of problem is somewhat specific to the market you are in. I don't think Bonnie works in the same environment (I'm sure she'll correct me if I'm wrong)
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>>Accountancy software for SMEs - hardly "on the edge"! :)
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>>>But I'm curious. Given that, by definition, you have a large number of clients with small businesses then how is the web-server side maintained. Are many of them happy to have their data on a un-owned server that is shared with others? If not, and they use their own web servers, then surelt you've a pretty large deployment job when it comes to updating the server code anyway.
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>>Depends on the size of the user. However, with the tendency towards SaaS based applications, the shift is squarely to hosted applications. Most of our typical users have little or no IT literacy or expertise. Their networks (if they exist) can be oddly configured. To simply connect to their application via a browser and not have to worry about backing up their data and whether their IT infrastructure passes muster is very attractive to users. Also, it means they can work from home or from their clients' premises or even off-line when on the train. They can re-sync their data when they have an internet connection back.
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>>>>This wouldn't be the case with browser apps, whether they be Ajax or, god forbid, proprietory Silverlight/Flash apps :)
>>>
>>>Not sure what you have against these - I still think that for a web-based app to be even remotely acceptable for day-in,day-out use it needs a much richer interface then you can obtain using bog-standard HTML.
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>>It seems you need to get up to speed with what is really happening in browser-based applications. Most of my browser based work is boot-strapped from a single HTML page and that is that - everything else is done in the browser. Only service calls are made to the server ... can be SOAP, RPC or JSON based but never HTML. As to Silverlight/Flash, being a C# developer, Silverlight would be a natural fit but it is uncertain whether it will be allowed to run on mobile devices. For example, you cannot run Flash on an iPhone and many of our users have iPhones. Apart from developing a native Objective-C application for an iPhone, the only other way is to run it on the iPhone Safari browser. The only way you can be sure that you browser based application will work on Safari is for it to be Web standards compliant and in this case, this means HTML, Javascript and CSS which is the foundation for many, very rich Ajax frameworks.
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>>>It just isn't practical to ship the whole thing backwards and forwards from the server everytime there's a change.
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>>I think I have answered that one :)
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>>>>Deployment/installation/versioning are a real pain with desktop apps - you just can't get away from that no matter how cunning you >As mentioned above Click-once can certainly ease that.
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>>It simplfies it somewhat but it is not the total solutions in many cases.
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>>>P.S. Have you looked at XBAP?
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>>What is the point of having a WPF application running in a browser that still needs the .NET 3/3.5 framework on the desktop running the browser? This is another VB6/ActiveDocument in a browser re-run from MS - well, Silverlight is ActiveX 2.0, what do you expect? :)
>>If you are going to use WPF, you may as well deploy it to the desktop in the usual way - XBAP really sucks. The project I am currently working on (in my day job) is WPF based and I like it. However, if MS think that WPF is going to keeps users on an MS Windows desktop, they are in "cloud-cuckoo" land.
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>>Hope you enjoyed your coffee - I am about to have my breakfast :)
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>>Cheers
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>>-=G