I wonder if there’s too much emphasis and effort being placed on Web applications that exist totally “in” Web browsers? The reason I wonder this is recently I’ve found a number of Web-based user interfaces that are painfully slow.
This, I contend, is a real problem particularly for skilled users who expect local application performance. For example, when I click on a menu option in Word it usually does whatever that option is supposed to do more-or-less immediately. Not so with many Web applications. You click, you wait, then you wait some more all the while watching the UI slowly build and reconfigure as the components are downloaded and integrated into the DOM.
So, maybe it is time for mashapps, my name for client-side programs that exist to front-end a Web application. EVen more useful would be the mashapp that integrates multiple Web applications.
Ideally a mashapp would provide a set of UI services and a Web application would tell the mashapp how the various UI components should be laid out and how they should behave. A simpler version would provide a static UI layout that would simply be updated by a Web application.
The goal is to give the user a great UI experience which means a highly responsive and functional interface – transactions with the remote Web server(s) will still take however long they take but all that sitting there waiting for the display to get itself organized would be a thing of the past.
I guess you could argue that applications created with products like Crystal Xcelsius and other RIA/dashboard generators are in this category but I have yet to find aclient-side platform that is as broadly flexible and capable of working with a wide range of Web services as I’m envisiging. Any vendors out there with a solution?
