Thank you for that in depth analysis
with nobody able to use local storage you were one bad hard drive away from losing everything (a situation that went away
I hate to break it to you but most corporations today don't want you to save things to your local hard drive. Shadow copy is nice and all but they want important docs to go to a file server.
sure you've got RAID but that just means you're 2 dead drives away from the grave
or three or ten or twenty, depending on how many hot spares you put into place.
it was slow, and all around it was a pain.
Was! we have this thing now called a *SAN*, running raid disks that are going to be faster than anything you find in a pee-cee.
All the "moves" I see in client server are a bunch of bluster and fluster with no real changes.
So in other words you are saying web based applications are not more prominent than they were 10 years ago? five years ago?
Terminal Services has been around in some form or another since NT3.51, changed names a couple of times but it's not a development of the last 5 years
And were crap until 2k, I never said it was not less than five years old. I said MS treated them like an after thought in NT4 which is more than 10 years old. but in the past five years they have significantly improved the product.
The reason ERP is going web is that a central repository is key to ERP.
So why not just use desktop clients that connect to a database like they have been doing with *ugg* Powerbuilder for years.
And really ERP shouldn't be going web because the UI for web app sucks, every app
No worse than powerbuilder. I have seen web based apps that look every but as good as local apps.
real client server to web based has taken a HUGE leap backward in usability.
Has not been my experience. I have seen web based apps that let you save session data to your local desktop just as if you were using a local app. What I do know is centralized apps save money, and save a good deal of it.
It does suck, that's as deep an analysis as thin client deserves.
Sure everybody wants the big documents on the file server, but as you say shadow copies are nice.
Nope it only takes two dead drives to kill a RAID array so long as one of the dead drives is the parity drive, lose the parity drive and one other at the same time and your data is toast. Chances of it happening are low, but it does happen.
The drives of the server have nothing to do with the slowness of running things over the network, the slowness is in moving data around. No network can read or save data faster than local, it's the nature of the beast, and when you add sending actual running code over the network the beast gets even slower.
Sure there's more, but they all have drawbacks (mostly in usability and speed) over client server, and client server still owns the majority of the market by a long shot.
Again, the improvements to the product has mostly been stealing features. NT4 Cytrix with TS gave you more functionality than 2K3 TS on it's own gives now, not much more but more. MS gets twitchy about people making money by adding obvious functionality to their products, it's the same reason they've been delving into anti-spyware stuff.
Because Powerbuilder is ugg. There's a lot of buzz again about web apps, but it'll fade, it always does.
I haven't seen any web app that works anywhere near as well as local, this is especially true if the app previously was local. Compare the last local version of any app that's made the mistake to their latest web version and you'll find the local version was faster, had better UI and was much more useful. It's a universal truth.
I haven't seen any centralized app save one single dollar. Sure they all say they do, but they're lying their butts off. They never take into account what happens when the network goes and suddenly nobody can do anything. 1 hour of down time for a central app can cost a mint.