Desktop development, the game of the bygone era, and the Web, which is the default platform for new applications nowadays, differ in a lot of ways. To an extent that they can be considered to be opposites of each other in many ways. Naturally, desktop development and Web development too differ from each other radically.
Web development was quite unnerving for me when I started with it. Not because HTTP is stateless, or because a Web user does not have an identity or because I had to learn a whole new set of technologies. All these were technical enough and I got a chance to understand and appreciate them too.
What broke most of my thought process was zero control over the user’s environment. Desktop applications can dictate their requirements through specifications and installation procedures. Not the Web, it is all for the lowest lowest lowest common denominator - a user with a browser, even if it is a text browser. The right approach here is to degrade gracefully but still make the content available, and this is what desktop developers are not used to.
The only reliable and consistent way to do this is to follow the standards. Not that standards are not important on the desktop, but they play a bigger role on the Web. Standards play the role of a common ground between all the environments.
For me, the most difficult thing about the Web development was to give up control over the user environments, and take the onus of making the content available and accessible. What was it for you?
September 3rd, 2008 at 2:45 am
It is difficult to say as the premise of your post (and your opening gambit) is seriously flawed. I don’t believe that desktop development is of a bygone era. I think that we are in the standard cycle of centralise everything, centralise nothing, repeat.
Certainly, the big money making applications are split between web and “fat” client. But I believe that the majority of applications that people want to spend their hard-earned cash on are the ones they install locally.
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Bob, thanks for your comment. I never said that desktop development is not useful anymore. However, as a trend, it has been replaced by the Web as the default platform for most of the applications. If you read some of my other posts, I prefer a lot of desktop applications to the Web applications. However, we cannot deny that Web is the trend for today.
October 8th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
[...] this makes the transition to developing public web sites more difficult. In fact I think it is the same as that for the desktop [...]