[Lazarus] Web vs desktop development

[Dariusz Mazur]

On 2016-01-17 02:10, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> On 2016-01-15 17:29, Anthony Walter wrote:
>> For businesses web development is probably a better fit for their software
>> needs.
> Yes in a way I see that, but having worked in the past (2014) in a 100%
> web based company developing online banking and mortgages software, I
> have seen first hand it is not all sunshine and roses - although
> everybody on the web wants you to believe it is.
We write our business application as web from several years. Its the 
same as desktop version, and development are done parallel as 90% of 
both version have the same source code.  And i have some others 
consideration:


>
> * Browser incompatibility plagued us every other day. Even different
> versions of the same browser caused problems (eg: Chrome being a big
> culprit).
Current browsers on base task are behave near equals. Of course new 
features discover new problems, but after some time there are gone also.

>
> * There seems to be a million and one web technologies. So you start
> your project using this and that. Six months later they all go... Oh
> that is so old school, or component A is now the coolest toy on the web,
> so we should rather use X and Y instead. This cycle never ends. Web
> technologies or components come and go WAY to quick.
This is main problem. But we choice ... VCL.
Some of assumptions:
on application forms and widgets have the same architecture as VCL: 
forms, windows, controls, fonts, near the same API

server build only HTML , each frame and widgets and data, but all look 
are done by CSS+JS on browser side.
Application has one page form, all  changes are transfer thought AJAX or 
websockets (similar as http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt)



each user action (click, touch) are transfer to application  and browser 
receive new content, this sound time bottleneck, but only seemingly,
this take less than 80ms , painting go longer.



>
> * Security was a major concern


>
> * Most web code look absolutely horrible! Desktop software is not
> immune, but they seem to have more practise in good design.
JS/CSS/HTML are hard to make good design, thus only smart part we write 
on it, most are in Pascal
>
> * Update Deployments were a nightmare - not nearly as easy as they make
> you believe.
why?

>
> * Testing and Quality assurance is really hard.
we don't notice difference from desktop, but theoretically its easier to 
imitate browser and testing behaving click by click.



--
Darek