Sun vs. Microsoft JVMs

F

FISH

Roedy Green said:
The natural evolution would have been to use Applets for data entry,
and send the digested information to a server. This would allow
bounds checking, etc. etc so that you would find out about errors the
keystroke you made them.

This did not happen.


[Excuse the late response]

While I cannot disagree with what you wrote above, I think you have
missed the real virtue of applets... they provide an opportunity to
do rich user interfaces in a way that forms cannot.

Web forms are still very much tied to their roots - HTTP queries.
They gather information to transfer via GET or POST to some form of
software on the server side, which returns dynamically generated
content. This is why you don't see sophisticated components like
trees, sliders, tables, etc.

With applets, MS's Hotmail could actually look and work like their
Outlook Express client. It could even work off-line. Its UI would
be as slick and responsive, and contain all the sophistication of a
genuine POP3 client. It could, for example, allow one message to be
read or edited, while others were still being downloaded from the
server in the background.

An e-Bay applet would enable users to keep track of all their bids
and auctions in real time - with minimal trafic across the network.
Imagine how much easier Google Groups would be if it actually had
a proper Newsreader interface, as opposed to a crude HTML approx-
imation? Likewise Yahoo Groups, MSN Groups and other on-line
forums!

Now, while I agree with whose who might cry "why would I want a POP3
client applet, when I have a perfectly good stand alone client on my
desktop!" (To which the reply can only be "why would you want a
webmail account when you have a perfectly good...etc".) The point
is really, as I suspect you'd agree Roedy, we never got to find out
truly how useful, or otherwise, such rich interface pages might have
been - its a path which is largely untravelled. (And to be honest I
don't think Shockwave/Flash is really cut out for doing serious
application-style interfaces.)


-FISH- ><>
 
G

Guest

Sudsy said:
You asked for evidence. I provided it. So now you denigrate me.
And hide your e-mail address so I can't reply directly and keep
this off-list.

Oh, brother. If you're going to overreact and act offended, it's not
worth continuing this discussion.
 
S

Scott Ellsworth

Roedy Green said:
With FORMS you don't even have the notion of mandatory fields. You
find out about each one on each 10 second trip.

That is why I am letting Tapestry handle the validation. It is not
perfect, but it can validate most stupid errors up front (bad formats,
missing data, etc.) without erasing everything, and before submit.

I do wish some kind of forms technology would finally get implemented
and popular such that this kind of basic 70's era data input was easy.

Scott
 
A

Andrew Thompson

We are putting up with THIN clients, browser-only, ones with zero
intelligence that submit entire forms to the server to do the
validations that would normally be done at the keystroke level,
treating our users with contempt.

...errr. Javascript is often better suited to
form validation, than Java.

An 18Kb .js may load off the net and be
responsive to user input faster than a 7Kb
jarred applet off the net ..with the 3-5Meg
of JVM off the local disk.

HTML based form elements (validate using JS)
are easier for the user to both change to their
tastes/needs via user defined stylesheets (in
relation particularly to text size and contrast),
and those elements respond in a way the user
expects in relation to 'autofill' and such things.

Further, HTML based form elements are inherently
easier to generate programmatically.

The final point is that ultimately, I feel there
would be more people with JS enabled browsers,
than Java enabled.

For all these reasons, it would have to be
a rare case that doing form validation in a
Java applet makes more sense than to do it
using Javascript.
 

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