Rich web applications

Rich web apps are all the rage these days (at least for those folks who are not trying to revive Swing on the desktop), and with good reason. Modern browsers, even the comparatively broken IE, have enough standards support to reasonable program sophisticated interaction. From Joel On Software’s Best Articles of 2004, comes this nominee: Koranteng’s Toli: On rich web applications, AlphaBlox and Oddpost. This article talks about the large amounts of JavaScript hacking that went into creating usable spreadsheets and presentation programs that run in the browser.

When asked how mere mortals (ie people who don’t have a whole team doing JavaScript for a year) can get in on the rich web app game, Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah suggested netWindows, which does sound interesting indeed. netWindows has a date picker, “content area”, split pane, sortable table, tree, menu and more… all supported in modern browsers, released under a liberal license. Most importantly, support is baked in for transferring data to/from the server without a refresh. As anyone who’s used gmail knows, this is a pretty key thing to making a responsive webapp.

I haven’t used netWindows yet, but I will definitely be taking a look at it later.