Rich Clients
These days I’m looking at web development in a deeper way. Well, too many things to go through in order to update myself [:)]. I’ve been working on a rich-client swing GUI, that has been an amazing experience.
Rich clients as also known as smart clients or fat clients are a very nice and powerful user interface whenever we need more than the web browser/html can do for us. Web applications are really desirable because we can serve lots of clients using the same application server, and more, we don’t have to worry about deployment, because whatever the user needs it’s a web browser. On the other hand web applications don’t have the power of a swing GUI or a C# .NET GUI has, because if we want to pre-process something that the user is doing we’ll end up having a bunch of round trips to the server side.
Rich clients give us the ability to pre-handle and pre-process any user interaction/calculation/validation before it goes to the server side, actually some piece of business logic is also distributed between the client and the server side, in order to facilitate the applications job. Of course, it shouldn’t be applied to any domain, instead we should look at the up and down sides of our choices, but if your problem seems to be something like this I wrote up, then you should consider using a rich client.