For a long period of time every ISV jumped on the browser bandwagon, meaning creating web versions of their existing fat clients. This transition was driven by Google’s everything web mantra, together with the emerging cloud technologies. The transition was moreover an answer to requirements from CIOs all over the world for an easier deployment when upgrading software internally. With a browser based app, you only need to update the server – and all of your users would automatically get upgraded. This approach would allow companies to purchase inexpensive computer equipment as the hardware literally only need to be capable of running a browser. Which is the whole idea being Google’s ChromeOS.
Initially moving away from fat clients to browser based app was painful. Mostly due to the limited capabilities of the web browsers, causing limitations to how advanced one could make the browser based apps. Over time the browser and standards behind the web (HTML, CSS and JS) became more and more sophisticated, allowing developers to create more rich web applications – Rich Internet Applications. With RIA developers could offer near desktop like experiences to their users, everything still within the framework of the browser. The browser became a platform for application execution, instead of a render of web information – which was the original purpose.
Alongside the continuously enhancement of web technologies to provide richer user experiences, or experiences close to what could be offered with native developed and deployed applications, technologies like MS NoTouch and Java WebStart emerged. These technologies solved the deployment headaches organizations had with traditional fat clients, by automatically downloading the app to your computer and execute it. If there was an update, you simply updated the server version – and the clients would automatically download the updated version. No need for IT personnel to physical be present to install software on individual computers. This was essentially the birth of the smart client. A desktop client that gave you all the benefits, like tight integration with the underlying OS and other components on the computer, offering features like drag’n drop.
An advantage of web clients is that you can access your data from any device, as the data or documents doesn’t reside locally. However, on the flip side that means that you can’t access your data UNLESS your connected to the internet. Smart clients allow you to store data locally, BUT then you can’t access your data unless you’re on the same device. With HTML5 and recent new specifications this is somewhat resolved. In HTML5 there’s the notion of local storage, the ability to store data locally in your browsers cache. Either as sessions data or actually local data. The latter allows you to store data locally and have that data available even if you’re disconnected. Drawback is that if users clears their cache all local data is gone. There’s another specification (http://dev.w3.org/html5/webdatabase/) defining an API for accessing a local SQL database.
Overall the HTML5 specification itself and the adjunct specification all serves the same purpose, trying to narrow the gap between web apps and clients executed on the device. Both in terms of User Experience and capabilities in terms of storing data locally. One of the key features of a traditional as well as smart client.
At WWDC 2011 Apple showed the way for allowing Smart Clients to seamlessly store any data in the cloud, so that you’ll be able to get to your data regardless of what device you’re using. They took NoTouch and WebStart further. With Apple’s new technologies you can develop applications that’s downloadable from the Mac or iOS AppStores, and they’ll get updated automatically when new versions are made available – same as NoTouch and WebStart. These applications can use the iCloud for storing data in the cloud so that the same data will be available on other devices, allowing you to seamlessly move between different devices, like a Mac, iPad, iPhone or iPod. The users don’t need to think about where their data is, “it just works” as Steve Jobs put it.
Will others adopt this approach? Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft does. That’ll allow them to keep their products as is, and at the same time get users to use Azure. They could of course go all web, as they partly have done with offering Office as a web offering, but honestly, Microsoft isn’t a web company. Just like Apple aren’t a web company. Only web company in this game is Google.
So looking at the recent development among web technologies, and recent announcements from Apple you’re moving to a point where the gap between web clients and smart clients are narrowing. This being said, then the smart clients with the close integration with the underlying OS still offers superior User Experience than a browser hosted application.
So what will the application of the future be? Browser based application or a Smart Client. Where the latter uses all the services available on the internet, and at the same time offers native capabilities. Personally I believe that we’ll see more native applications in the Apple world, as there’s a lot of developers that previous worked on iOS using Apple’s tools – that now can start thinking about building integrated applications across multiple devices, without the maintenance nightmare of having to update computers by manually installing the updated. If Microsoft follows suit and start adopting the Apple approach in Windows 8 and later on tablets – my take is that the road it paved towards more Smart Clients and less browser based clients.
Claus Jepsen 