I’ve always been thinking that web GUI applications are terribly stone-ageish, compared to their rich-client counterparts. But with the advent of AJAX and Web 2.0, we’ve actually gotten something that’s better than what we get in traditional GUIs: GUI responsiveness. In order to make an ordinary GUI responsive, we have to let user actions spawn actions in separate threads, which cannot directly update the GUI, since typically, GUI APIs don’t allow updates performed in anything but the main thread. So, lazy programmers always skip making some of those operations asynchronous, and the GUI won’t be very responsive as a result.
But web GUIs always respond to clicks (well, as far as the browser GUI is responsive; that’s not always the case, just watch Internet Explorer), so the web application GUI itself will be responsive whether the developer of it wants or not. So the developers are forced to address this, on the server. But no longer does the problem of updating the GUI in a single thread exist, since the browser and server are separated over the network.
It is possible to build response rich-client GUIs, but too few people are actually doing it.
Update (same day): The responsiveness has always been there in web applications, of course, regardless of whether AJAX has been used or not, but not until now, web GUIs have reached a standard where they can favourably be compared to traditional desktop GUIs.
Filed under: Software Development, Technology, Web
