How Microsoft Lost the API War
by Volker Weber
Stop what you are doing. Right now. And read another excellent article written by Joel Spolsky.
Comments
Is IBM swimming upstream with its own rich client technology? It has been a number of years since I met a new client (not already committed to Notes) which was open to its use as an application platform.
And, although the Java applets delivered with it do a good job of supporting (for the web) the workflow api that is the true value in Notes/Domino, the resulting Web interface is just plain ugly, by today's standards. And hard to maintain, into the bargain.
IBM's customary answer is Websphere integration, but I just don't like the huge deployment footprint. And the Java Server Pages component model is just plain unpleasant compared to something like Tapestry, ASP.NET or Zope. Correct me if I'm missing something obvious here.
I don't think that IBM swimms upstream. The idea behind the Eclipse client: marry the "server has it all" model of a web server with a resonable responsive UI, that is similar to a browser pretty platform agnostic.
The real (corporate) value behind the eclipse client: it unifies the interaction model of applications. So it moves the notion of "common tasks" into the real of custom applications (remember how long it took Microsoft to get a consistent UI across office!) that even might come from different vendors.
If they can make the Eclipse Framework pervasively available and add a roaming user model to it, it can be just the "Application Browser" that lives beside the "Page browser" (a.k.a Web-Browser) and the "eMail browser" as a default on each computer.
my 0.02$
;-) stw
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