>I think the fact that it's a distributed model is the scariest part! One of the biggest challenges of creating the new apps will be exception code for those distributed services that aren't working.
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>Perhaps you control every service and can get them all back on line if one goes down, perhaps you don't use a T1 or you have one that NEVER goes down, perhaps encoding, http, parsing and internet bandwith will always be fast enough, perhaps the interfaces to your services will never break...
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>Distributed can mean slower with more points of failure and less contol over them.


Distributted computing is a design decision as much as it is a physical disconnected issue. I think you're taking things way to literal.

Today's real systems are Web based and will need to deal with connectivity issues. By building apps this way even if they're not disconnected the disconnected functionality can basically be plugged in at will...

It's not for everybody, but it's a great way to have real reason to build n-Tier systems, because distributdd computing really doesn't work any other way!