Web based applications today are promising but still too immature to challenge the performance of desktop applications when it comes to the richness of the User Interface and the diversity of applications.
Apart from the limitations of what the Browser can and cannot do – some of the other major challenges are:
- Connectivity – For the apps to work, you always need a connection. Further the quality of the quality of the connection dictates what can and cannot be done.
- Process intensive tasks – Like image processing, data analysis, etc take too long and can make the pages time out and further server scalability a challenge.
Given that Google is so vested in online apps and they have the resources to actually address these problems – They exactly did exactly that with Google Gear. This provides a elegant way to work with web pages offline, thus enabling the web applications to work with limited or no connectivity and at the same time do some processing off line.
It is really exciting as it offers a way to solve may problems that I had in the past.
For example – In an application, I had a mobile user that had limited or no connectivity with a laptop collecting data onsite (survey) that was huge (hi-res pictures and video). To upload it we had a “web version” and a “desktop version”. The desktop version was used on-site and would sync with the server, once the mobile user got back to the “home station”. The home-station was the same laptop with a wired high-speed connection.
The problem with this solution? We had to maintain two separate application. Further we were limited to certain platforms for the desktop application which limited our choice on the server (as we wanted the same developer skill sets).
But that can change with Google Gear and I think they have really addressed very real issue with Webware. How does it solve your problem?