More Evidence of the Importance of Smart Clients

"Six Apart Ltd.'s TypePad blog hosting service went down for the day last Friday following a failed storage upgrade. Affected customers included Major League Baseball's MLB.com site, which hosts all of its blogs with TypePad. In addition, the del.icio.us bookmark-sharing service that Yahoo Inc. just bought suffered days of problems last week after its data center lost power."  -- Infoworld.

The interesting thing to note is that many of the AJAX dazed tout centralized deployment and management as one of the driving factors behind browser based web apps.  But as we can clearly see, centralized deployment means that you create a centralized point of failure for all users. 

I think it was The Wrath of Khan where we learned that "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one".  Apparently some organizations didn't see that movie.

3 Comments

  • There are very few fat clients (I'd rather call it this way, there's nothing smart in smart client) which are not dependent on remote servers. Without Internet connection, most fat clients are worthless.

    It certainly wiser to have mirror sites, fault tolerant systems to ensure the server is up. Then thin client is the prefered choice. People the world over are tired of the high total cost of ownership they have to face with so many software installations.

    It's a nusance and we all know it.

  • Amitai,



    I can agree with you that installing a fat client can be troublesome, however, can you honestly say that you rely totally on web apps? I rely on them more and more, but for truly important things, I find I always need a smart client. At the very least, I believe the great web apps out there need to make the content available for download to the true owner of that content. At the very least for personal backup means.



    I also disagree with you regarding the reliance of fat clients on a remote server. Take for example RSS aggregators or email. Have you ever sat on a plane and watched as the person next to you uses that time to go through hundreds of emails, replying to them, deleting them, etc? If so, that person may have been me. As soon as I "plug in" all those new emails are sent, and all deleted items are deleted. Try that with a web app at 30,000 feet. And sure, I realize that scenario will change when broadband is release to airlines, but there is a multitude of scenarios I can think of where a fat client is simply necessary,



    My 2 cents.



    jw

  • What happened to the term "windows program"? We must now call them smart clients? I wanted to comment on your HP driver post but the comments are closed. Hp is the most infuriatingly stupid company in this regard, even if they change the policy it will take place at glacial speed. I generally won't buy hp computers for this reason. I've had this problem with every hp device I've ever bought.





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