Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
by pmontra on Monday May 18, 2020 @02:15AM
(#23218958)
> [the absence of a package manager was] a big part of why web applications took off in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Of course apt-get is very convenient but I can't see a Microsoft version of it letting companies deliver multiple daily updates.
Based on my experience of the time the reasons were, in random order
- HTML GUIs were less functional but easier to code and good enough for most problems
- we could deploy many times per day for all our customers
- we could use Java on the backend and people didn't have to install the JVM on their PCs
- it worked on Windows and Macs, palmtops (does anybody remember them?) and anything else
- it was very easy to make it access our internal database
- a single component inside the firewall generates the GUI and accesses the db instead of a frontend and a backend, which by the way is the modern approach (but it costs more and we didn't have the extra functionality back then, js was little more than cosmetic)
Of course apt-get is very convenient but I can't see a Microsoft version of it letting companies deliver multiple daily updates.
Based on my experience of the time the reasons were, in random order
- HTML GUIs were less functional but easier to code and good enough for most problems
- we could deploy many times per day for all our customers
- we could use Java on the backend and people didn't have to install the JVM on their PCs
- it worked on Windows and Macs, palmtops (does anybody remember them?) and anything else
- it was very easy to make it access our internal database
- a single component inside the firewall generates the GUI and accesses the db instead of a frontend and a backend, which by the way is the modern approach (but it costs more and we didn't have the extra functionality back then, js was little more than cosmetic)