Re:Is anyone working on something that is not a website?
by nostrademons on Thursday May 10, 2007 @05:47PM
(#21159)
Everything you mention is true, and a huge pain when developing desktop applications. One of the projects I've worked on was to serve as the release engineer for a desktop app that involved a Winsock layered service provider, a background Windows service, a system tray icon, and a Java control application, plus a large server-side component. My job basically consisted of making a tweak to the InstallShield scripts, pushing it out to a dozen VirtualPC images, and making sure it all worked and I didn't hose anything. Then I'd find out that eg. it didn't work with Symantec Personal Firewall, because they based their code off the same sample Microsoft LSP that we did, the one that explicitly says "Do not use for production code", and didn't fix the bug that we spent a week tracking down.
But webapps have the same problem, they just push the complexity into a different area. I also volunteered for FictionAlley.org, a mid-size (110k or so registered users) web community. We would get complaints from users that the site was unreadable on their 40 character PDA screen. We'd get e-mails from blind people saying could we please make the site handicap-accessible and usable on their screen readers. We would get irate e-mails from Opera users about display glitches, or irate e-mails from Mac users wondering why the latest feature we just released didn't work on Safari. We'd get tirades from people because we added navigation bars, after getting tirades from people because we didn't have navigation bars. We'd get constant complaints about the (free) site being too slow, because we didn't have money for more servers.
Until you've actually been involved with a website that has lots of visitors, you have no idea what goes on behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly (or sometimes not-so-smoothly). Yes, desktop apps are hard. I've done them - not just the release engineering stuff above, but I also wrote the Java app included in the package, and I wrote a Netbeans plugin for my current employer, and both had to deal with the sticky platform-and-threading issues necessary for a responsive, professional UI. I still say that webapps are harder.
But webapps have the same problem, they just push the complexity into a different area. I also volunteered for FictionAlley.org, a mid-size (110k or so registered users) web community. We would get complaints from users that the site was unreadable on their 40 character PDA screen. We'd get e-mails from blind people saying could we please make the site handicap-accessible and usable on their screen readers. We would get irate e-mails from Opera users about display glitches, or irate e-mails from Mac users wondering why the latest feature we just released didn't work on Safari. We'd get tirades from people because we added navigation bars, after getting tirades from people because we didn't have navigation bars. We'd get constant complaints about the (free) site being too slow, because we didn't have money for more servers.
Until you've actually been involved with a website that has lots of visitors, you have no idea what goes on behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly (or sometimes not-so-smoothly). Yes, desktop apps are hard. I've done them - not just the release engineering stuff above, but I also wrote the Java app included in the package, and I wrote a Netbeans plugin for my current employer, and both had to deal with the sticky platform-and-threading issues necessary for a responsive, professional UI. I still say that webapps are harder.