Agree, but I'll include in this "poor design/architecture" the lack of local data engine. I can imagine that, if lookup data is stored locally and only transactions go over wire, the overall application performance would be much better, especially when a lot of static data is involved.
Not to mention the unnecesarry bandwidth and time wasted.

Dorin

>What you articulate below is a function of poor design/architecture. It is not an issue of having the data stored locally.
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>I have worked with on-line bank apps to get history, etc - and I have not encountered bad performance when the network is properly running. Of course, if the pipe gets bogged down - you may hit some road-blocks - but that is not necessarily a symptom of an inherent problem with the application.
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>< JVP >
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>>Hi.
>>Just a sample from real world.
>>My wife is in accounting department of our company. She has an on-line banking application, running in IE, based on JAVA applets. So far so good, but when she must enter payments in the applet interface, seems that no data is saved locally, and the interface is VERY slow. She must select the destination bank by enter some data in a query form and then wait, and wait, until the selectable banks list is returned. If she knows exactly the bank code, OK, the selection can be made quite fast, but if she doesn't, it is a PITA. And if more than 400 rows are returned, the query is cancelled . The same with customers, the application is kind enough to save all customers data, but at server side,not locally. So the PITA part two. What is annoying is that those lists are really static, and not a secret (we have listings with those banks) and our customers are, again, not a secret.
>>The point is that, I'm sure this application is very scalable, n-tier, but, from user POV is a pain to work with.
>>So, I wonder, what's wrong to use those powerful workstations to do some data processing locally and not let them be just dumb terminals?
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>>>UI's that allow Users to actually interact with the system at a level that does not slow down their mental model; somthing that is facilitated by a native DML.
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>>>I'll take your word on this as I don't understand the point.
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>>>Obviously, some of us have an appreciation for the User experience that goes beyond "scalability" (which is generally something the user is not even aware off and makes no difference when they're trying to get through their daily tasks).
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>>>Usability *is* a dimension of scalability.