4 ms·

You're overlooking the fundamental quality of the web and why a lowly document format and simple protocol eventually became a poor man's GUI platform that has b

You're overlooking the fundamental quality of the web and why a lowly document format and simple protocol eventually became a poor man's GUI platform that has been slowly rolling forward and crushing the desktop app market in its wake. The web is a fully cross-platform/cross-device, installation-free, and open-standards-based platform. Although traditional GUI toolkits can chip away at different aspects of this, it is actually a much more intractable problem for them to solve than the aspects you cite as native desktop apps being better at. For example, interoperability between web apps has gotten steadily better as HTTP APIs have evolved, today's generation of web apps often make interoperability a selling point (Slack is a good example). From a traditional single-platform native developer the mechanism for this looks crufty and ill-defined, but that is the price you pay for a truly open standard not controlled by a monolithic entity. For instance, for all the beauty and elegance of Microsoft Visual Studio, there is no way they can bring that experience to OS X and Linux, let alone all the mobile platforms. Native app developers have been wringing their hands over the "inferiority" of the web for 15 years now, but all the while ignoring that the web does something which no technology has ever done in terms of ubiquity. And what enabled this was the trojan horse of HTML/HTTP's initial simplicity. Hell, the simple HTML documents for which the format is ideally suited still outnumber apps by an order of magnitude, but the beauty is you have one platform that can support everything on the complexity continuum from the simplest documents all the way up to sophisticated business apps.

kipple 12y ago
Agreed, especially about integration. Many web apps expose their functionality with RESTful JSON APIs or similar. It seems to me that integrating data & functionality from across web apps is far more common than in the desktop setting. I've never built a desktop app, but just from a users perspective most of my desktop apps are isolated pieces of functionality while web apps are entangled in the greater web community. My background is mostly web app development, and when I started I was using open technologies such as PHP and NodeJS. This summer I'm doing some work in Visual Studio with a C# .NET MVC 4000 web app. Visual Studio is a slick interface _mostly_ with some great convenience _usually_ but overall it feels suffocating compared to slapping together random tangles of open web technologies. I like the messy open standards...
- rimantas 12y ago
  And many non web apps happily use RESTful JSON APIs too.
- ewzimm 12y ago
  You can even compare web standards to the most ubiquitous formats used in the most ubiquitous desktop programs. MS Office formats still cause people problems when they try to open complex files in older versions of Office or compatible suites. Whereas if data is stored as JSON, you can be sure that anybody will be able to access the data correctly in any of the thousands of apps that handle JSON, and they'll be able to handle it indefinitely.
  - waps 12y ago
    I don't often agree with Richard Stallman, but ... http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.comp... The TLDR is simple : web apps makes Unisys, Microsoft, Apple, ... look like heroes of Freedom, even during their most anticompetitive days. The worst behaviour microsoft ever exhibited is now standard practice. That's what web apps have gotten us. That, of course, in addition to the fact that saying that the tools suck does not quite do justice to just how bad web development tools are.
    - ewzimm 12y ago
      I do often agree with Richard Stallman, but... These are problems with particular web apps, not web apps in general. I host lots of web apps on my own servers, and they are just as free as any software, but I can access them anywhere from any device. In cases where web apps are non-free, I would have to say it's better than having them installed locally. Web browsers do quite a bit to keep apps in jails where they can't access and affect the rest of the system in the same way a local program can.
      - waps 12y ago
mattmanser 12y ago
This seems very biased. Web developers have been "wringing their hands" for the last 5 years swearing blind that any day now everyone's going to give up on smart phone native app development and go html5. All the web has managed to prove is how badly MS cocked up app deployment on windows, nothing more. The web 'won' against one platform, windows deployment, MSIs and the rubbish they've been putting out with WPF, "one click" deployment. Smart phones have shown us how the web actually doesn't compete very well against native once a decent deployment solution is in place.

kipple 12y ago

Agreed, especially about integration. Many web apps expose their functionality with RESTful JSON APIs or similar. It seems to me that integrating data & functionality from across web apps is far more common than in the desktop setting. I've never built a desktop app, but just from a users perspective most of my desktop apps are isolated pieces of functionality while web apps are entangled in the greater web community. My background is mostly web app development, and when I started I was using open technologies such as PHP and NodeJS. This summer I'm doing some work in Visual Studio with a C# .NET MVC 4000 web app. Visual Studio is a slick interface _mostly_ with some great convenience _usually_ but overall it feels suffocating compared to slapping together random tangles of open web technologies. I like the messy open standards...

rimantas 12y ago
And many non web apps happily use RESTful JSON APIs too.
ewzimm 12y ago
You can even compare web standards to the most ubiquitous formats used in the most ubiquitous desktop programs. MS Office formats still cause people problems when they try to open complex files in older versions of Office or compatible suites. Whereas if data is stored as JSON, you can be sure that anybody will be able to access the data correctly in any of the thousands of apps that handle JSON, and they'll be able to handle it indefinitely.
- waps 12y ago
  I don't often agree with Richard Stallman, but ... http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.comp... The TLDR is simple : web apps makes Unisys, Microsoft, Apple, ... look like heroes of Freedom, even during their most anticompetitive days. The worst behaviour microsoft ever exhibited is now standard practice. That's what web apps have gotten us. That, of course, in addition to the fact that saying that the tools suck does not quite do justice to just how bad web development tools are.
  - ewzimm 12y ago
    I do often agree with Richard Stallman, but... These are problems with particular web apps, not web apps in general. I host lots of web apps on my own servers, and they are just as free as any software, but I can access them anywhere from any device. In cases where web apps are non-free, I would have to say it's better than having them installed locally. Web browsers do quite a bit to keep apps in jails where they can't access and affect the rest of the system in the same way a local program can.
    - waps 12y ago

mattmanser 12y ago

This seems very biased. Web developers have been "wringing their hands" for the last 5 years swearing blind that any day now everyone's going to give up on smart phone native app development and go html5. All the web has managed to prove is how badly MS cocked up app deployment on windows, nothing more. The web 'won' against one platform, windows deployment, MSIs and the rubbish they've been putting out with WPF, "one click" deployment. Smart phones have shown us how the web actually doesn't compete very well against native once a decent deployment solution is in place.