Ah, thick clients are coming back again, and now we've reached the point where people start trying to build asynchronous applications because they're frustrated

Ah, thick clients are coming back again, and now we've reached the point where people start trying to build asynchronous applications because they're frustrated with choppy UI. Unfortunately, pretending the network isn't there doesn't make it so. The flakiness has to come out somewhere, sometime. Either you make the user wait now, or you explain later, after you've lied about what you did. It's a tricky tradeoff. Let's fast-forward to the end of the movie: You'll end up with a zillion special cases that are impossible to test properly. You'll decide to restore sanity by replicating the data into a client-side store with low latency and high reliability, so you can go back to a synchronous UI that your developers can reason about. All the craziness will be in a background process that syncs the client and server stores, which will still have to cause weird behavior as reality demands it, but at least the logic is contained. (I just described an IMAP mail client, or--for a Normandy-invasion-scale example--some versions of Microsoft Outlook.) Then a new thin client platform comes along where you can't do all that complicated client-side stuff. The cycle repeats.