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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: The Browser Wars are Dead! Long Live the Browser Wa rs!
 From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@p...] >Fortune 500 companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the >development of core business apps that run in web browsers. You believe >that you understand the industry better than the people who build those >apps because you use FoxPro (of all things). Which industry did you have in mind? Ok, let's take the one I work in. I'll take this from an RFP of average difficulty in this industry and only include one of the systems, the records management side. From scratch and on your own nickel, build a commercial relational database system for large multi-juridictional agencies. It uses approximately 250 related tables, about 200 forms, 5500 fields, 24x7x365@99.99 reliability real time. The table/form/field requirements expand with every release. Ensure it is customizable by the customer, thrives between version releases (same reliability numbers), has store and forward interfaces among legacy systems, provides a user-friendly (say idiot proof) report generator, ad hoc querying, integration with existing document systems and Corel and MS Office, magnetic stripe readers, automatic fingerprint systems, bar coding, has field level security, multi-agency applicability, data mining, and provides rapid response (has to be about a second and half or less for average operations and that is worst case even for complex queries with multiple joins). It has to support command line interfaces as well as GUI, meet HIPPA Federal security requirements (absolutely cannot be hacked), allows all Geofiles to be updated by non-technical personnel, and provides a master clock for the network system. These are just some requirements but they provide a flavor. Now maintain it at hundreds of sites. Scale counts. Release a new version at least twice a year including features both from existing customers and managing the requirements of all new customers. Keep reselling it in a market where the average system sells at about 1.5mil (include the hardware) but your clients and servers sell in the range of 100k. This is not a toolkit to develop tools from, but a near shrinkwrap installed application with a cutover that doesn't down the existing system (remember you have to do data conversion too but you can charge more for that). The customer might have an IT department but don't count on it. This is not a custom-built system, but one that has to be sold as a commercial product in a market with at least six tier 1 competitors and dozens of tier 2 competitors. The same system has to work for a very small or very large department with installations having as many as 1000 real time concurrent users doing not just access, but the whole range of SQL operations (and don't forget, 1.5 seconds). BTW: there is no such thing as an industry standard for the data model; just some stuff for the admin reporting chain, essentially, statistical data. A common schema? Fagedaboutit. Interoperation with competitor systems? Not likely but when it happens, delimited ASCII is de rigeur. Common API? Say ODBC. Keep in mind, heroic effort might succeed once. Twice is dicey. As for FoxPro, it wasn't my choice, but once I learned Fox, the sense of it was obvious. Years and years of experience went into developing a dedicated relational client that has the performance required and enables professionals to build fast, test, and field. Hard to do with Frontpage. Impossible in the ASCII editor. The tools are there because they make the big projects affordable. It is easy to embed a web browser object in a form, and for some tasks, that is the right solution. Again, my cut here is not against the web or the browser, but against the naivete with which they are presented as the only way to build systems these days. Browser-based solutions are not a complete answer, part of one, but not the whole. So again, what I am looking for is creative thinking on the subject of frameworks that are web and XML capable, but only as needed. What I heard in Cagle's description of Box's speech intrigued me. It was as if someone was actually taking the time to do some serious what-if thinking about a new generation of very large distibuted computing frameworks not hamstrung by the legacy of a 40 year old stateless network architecture designed for nuclear blowout. What I read about XDocs is intriguing because it appears to make the web available to the other components without dragging around what for some applications is the useless overhead of HTML but integrates WYSIWYG like document editing with structured relational data. Sounds Good. Waiting to see what these are. Otherwise, back to hacking Fox. Yes, they spend hundreds of millions on core systems running in web browsers. Some of them are spending it twice because they really believed they were getting a zero-footprint, zero-install system and forgot to verify that the technology applied could actually accomplish the job at hand. They under-spec'd, believed what they heard and signed the procurement. Here's one to ponder from an RFP on my desk: "Must support XML output without customization." That's the whole requirement for XML in an RFP of over 300 pages. ROTFLMAO. len 
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