Facades – damn, that’s nice!
Lately all coolest things are being done online. The whole concept of on-line application is a pretty revolutionary idea. You only have to maintain ONE installation, people can access your app at all times from any machine connected to internet, if you wish, and most people would, you can really track what your users are doing with your app, both to see what needs to be improved and covertly do some data mining, I can go on forever. Web is cool, desktop is not. We got it. Take a look at a job postings for developers, I dare you to search one of the employment sites like workopolis.com for C# and come up with at least one job that does not involve ASP in some way shape or form. I am not saying that web development is bad, on the contrary, it is an excellent way to expand your user base and promote your product, but what about desktop, do we still need it?
Lately there have been some discussions at work about creating an online version of our flagship product. Recent changes, such as OpenXML would allow us to do this, technically, but after we asked our customers, not too many of them were thrilled with this prospect. I was a big proponent of the on-line version for two pretty selfish reasons:
- It’s a cool project, I have not done anything this significant in ASP and it would be nice to try.
- I don’t have to worry about users specific machine installs which at times makes my blood pressure to rise reaching pre-heart attach conditions.
So I was perplexed with the result of that mini survey our customers completed. Why would people not want to run a web app? I have to admit, the survey itself was worded in a way that promoted this idea, so the result was truly unexpected. I’ve talked to the clients myself and their biggest problem with web app is security. So let’s say you have a study that brings you about half a mil a year, what precautions are you willing to implement so that the data of that survey is to remain confidential before the delivery? People are liking web based things, corporations are worried about privacy where web apps are concerned.
I don’t know about you, but corporations pay my bills. So it’s desktop all the way, web app has been put on a back burner for now.
All of the above is serving as an introduction to what I wanted to write about. Not too much effort has been put into desktop development, but there are some incredibly cool things being done for desktop. I found Facades, and I am truly impressed. If this is where we are going with desktop, I am excited. And yes, I know it’s Linux based, but the whole concept seems very entertaining.