Rev vs. AJAX...Or Web-Aware Apps vs. Web Apps

[Chipp Walters]

Dan Shafer wrote:

> Now, lest you conclude that I'm ready to chuck Rev in favor of Laszlo  
> or AJAX, let me assure you that isn't in the cards, at least not yet.  
> Because standalone apps still have some big advantages and of course  
> Rev adds to those with its rapid development capability for cross- 
> platform software. Standalone apps are still:
> 
> * generally faster than Web apps
> * not dependent upon a reasonably fast Internet connection
> * not dependent on a server "out there somewhere" being up and  running 
> and not overloaded
> * better looking with better user experiences (at least potentially)
> * easier to protect against unauthorized use
> * able to read and write data to and from the user's local drive  (which 
> neither Laszlo nor AJAX can do, being confined in a security  sandbox)

Dan and I have been going around on this for awhile now privately. 
Frankly, I'm not a real big AJAX fan. In fact, I think it's not much 
more than the current flavor of the month.

A couple more bullet points to add to your list:

1) How many companies would seriously consider using AJAX (or Rev for 
that matter) for a large-scale revenue producing project? Not startups, 
mind you, but companies who really need apps that perform...like Adobe.

2) And this one really gets me. It's bad enough to have to modify your 
code every operating system update, but with AJAX and LASLO, you now 
have to provide maintenance on every browser version update (Firefox, 
IE, Safari, Konqueror, Opera, PDA browsers(?)) as well as every Flash 
plugin update. Not to mention you're at the total mercy of the creators 
of those products as well as all the standards committees who are 
'pushing for nextgen' type stuff. So, if Macromedia thinks Flash is too 
difficult to program and change their scripting paradigm for Flash 
(they've done it 3 times before!)-- your hosed. Or, MS decides to no 
longer play nice with CSS standards groups because they don't want to 
lose any more market share (heck they do this already with the .doc 
format) and purposefully make their browser incompatible-- again you're 
hosed.

3) Ever try debugging AJAX apps? Whew!!! From what I know, there are 
very few decent debuggers for Javascript and the XML doc object common 
in browsers these days.

Just a few of the many reasons I don't really see the 'browser based 
apps' ever really competing.

-Chipp