What Rich Client Applications Can Learn from the Web

Zef writes in Ajax Reality Check that

Does anybody realize where we came from and that these “web 2.0 technologies” aren’t great at all, but just the best we could do — in the browser?

However, I assert that desktop apps do have something to learn from the browser¹, and it’s not ajax.

Here is my list:

1. Bookmarkable applications. I can send you the URL of a particular screen, or a particular record.

2. This opens up applications to easily implement Most Recently Used Feature, or Most Recently Accessed Data

3. It makes it easy to add annotation-like features to an app (through mashups).²

4. You can create mashups easily, e.g. treat an application as a component for free³

5. Back button and Breadcrumbs (MSMoney-style UI), although the caching of application screens on browser make this somewhat broken, but desktop apps will be able to address this.

6. Ease of deployment – no need for Administrator rights to install applications, modify registry, centralized profiles. Notably, a lot of apps today are still written in the style that network availability and bandwidth is poor, rather than the other way round – ubiquitious network availability. (Sidenote: things get interesting in the mobile space, because bandwidth is expensive, while storage gets cheaper, you might see a resurgence of the older style of programming again)

Footnotes

¹Check out AJAX is not a mobile paradigm

²I had mentioned here:

In Scribbling in the Margins, Jon Udell’s thesis is that extensibility was the mark of enduring design. Jon likened the extension of DNS records for use in SPF to how people scribble in the margins of a document.

³There are versioning and security issues with mash ups though. Spoofing, CSRF. Any guidance on doing this properly with a critical app?