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'Til the Fat Client Sings

By Larry O'Brien

July 15, 2004 — (Page 1 of 3)
Web-based deployment comes in and out of favor but often founders because of the conflation of HTML-using, browser-based and Web-deployment concerns. Additionally, many discussions of "fat client," Web-deployed software get derailed by concerns about server-based "rental" fees or server-side resource consumption.

Web-based deployment comes in and out of favor but often founders because of the conflation of HTML-using, browser-based and Web-deployment concerns. Additionally, many discussions of "fat client," Web-deployed software get derailed by concerns about server-based "rental" fees or server-side resource consumption.

Joel Spolsky, the insightful proprietor of Fog Creek Software, dropped a cherry bomb in this particular anthill by writing "How Microsoft Lost the API War", in which he concludes that "the new winners in the application development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing." In other words, he says that only the thinnest-client model is viable.

Spolsky does a good job differentiating two competing camps within Microsoft: one dedicated to backward compatibility (he labels this the "Raymond Chen" camp, after the Microsoft developer who diligently blogs about the issue), and another dedicated to furthering the use of every conceivable combination of Microsoft technologies (the "MSDN Magazine" camp).

Naturally, the Microsoft argument is that these two camps are totally cooperative, that users might want to build apps that rely upon integrating BizTalk with Flight Simulator via SharePoint. Nevertheless, Spolsky's construction identifies a real tension that exists, not just at Microsoft, but at any company evolving complex software.

However, it's putting the cart before the horse to claim that lack of backward compatibility can drive the choice of thick or thin clients. The choice of client "thickness" is based on the UI and deployment.

Although the UI often drives the choice, the deployment model, which consists of updating directories on the production server and having them load in clients over the network, is a more compelling point. You can't do everything you want with a hyperlink and a stylesheet, but you can prevent nightmares by having a single source for critical binaries.

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