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A More Complex Application
So you say that the previous example was too simple. What about a real world example? As you will see, the case against server side only programming is just as compelling. Let's look at a Web application that analyzes sales data from a corporate database. The database basically provides about a thousand points of data for each analysis. These data points are for a particular category of products over a particular duration of time.
The users require the application to be able to do:
These are reasonable requirements, and can be found on a number of PC-based products, such as Microsoft Excel and Corel's Quattro-Pro. Even some database systems, such as Borland's Paradox, can produce such presentations with fairly minimal programming.
A server-side application can provide part of the solution. For example, the ability to get data from the database is a feature in many second-generation Web application tools. The database server or the server application could calculate some of the statistics. A VRML display could provide 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional views. However, there are two requirements still outstanding:
These last two requirements doom the server-side only approach, because the results are either not scalable or just too difficult or nearly impossible to develop. Of course, one could just tell the users to be happy with what they had (or some day would have), but this again means that the users cannot be productive.
For applications like this, to which users have become accustomed over the last ten years, a server-side solution does not exist.
A client-side solution would use existing client-side components:
For the data points you use a third-generation Web tool like Sapphire/Web, which will be discussed later.
Now that you have the components, you turn to building the application. You glue the pieces together using Java or a script language like JavaScript or VBScript.
These products do not offer a steep learning curve: the components and languages are very high-level and relative novices can learn to produce significant applications in a surprisingly short time. Remember that if your developers know Visual Basic or C/C++, they will be able to start almost immediately.
Now that they are working in an already-familiar environment, your programming staff will find that there are tools available which eliminate most coding tasks.
If you need to meet a new user requirement, you can very often meet this requirement with a component and a couple lines of code. Your application will prove to be orders of magnitude more efficient for your organization, and the users will be more productive sooner.
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