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I'm not really sure why you think that web development is the only form of software development that writes distributed software. This seems like a bogus assum

• nostrademons 19y ago
  I've worked on one that's distributed and partially web-based (large parallel-programming cluster with 3 different web clients and two desktop clients). The difference is that in a webapp, you have to think of the implications of distribution on every user request. So you have to consider latency and status feedback for everything the user does, you can't use shared state, you have to keep in-memory data structures to a minimum, you can't count on getting notification when events occur, and so on. Desktop-based apps with a distributed back-end usually have a well-defined interface to the cluster. As long as you don't need to update the backend, you can keep anything you want in memory. And you usually have a two-way connection: you don't need to frame everything in terms of request/responses.