Webification: The Thin And Fat Of It

By Bruce Robertson  Our national pastime used to be baseball. Lately, however, it's been about dieting. Everywhere you look, things are "less filling." People continually are trying fad diets designed to "help you lose the weight and slim your body." Marketers are trumpeting exemplary customers who've lost weight on their diet plans. But they don't show you what happens after weight loss is achieved. Nearly everyone I know who's tried a fad diet has inevitably gained back all the weight. As much as I can't stand to see Richard Simmons do his thing, at least he has the right idea: Don't just eat less; eat less and healthier and exercise more. Unfortunately, lots of folks--developers, the press, corporate application desig ners and even networkers--view the Web approach to applications as the ultimate diet plan. But putting client applications on a Web diet plan doesn't mean that the whole system is getting any more fit. Without additional exercise of applications to ensure they're efficient on servers and networks, "slim fast Webification" approaches will be as much a success as most popular diet fads. Webification: The Internet Diet Plan? Webifying applications is clearly a new approach to application deployment. If the application in its native architecture doesn't work well over WANs--like an internal frame relay or an external Internet--just Webify it. Create a generic three-tier model. Behind the Web server, you can dedicate LAN bandwidth in the data center to connect to the actual resource server. The enterprise network or Internet part will be HTTP. I've talked a lot in the past about the characteristics of HTTP as a protocol and HTML as a page-definition language (see "HTTP's Greatly Exaggerated Death," ). And I've also discussed Java-centric approaches to application connectivity on the Internet (see "Application Switching: Looking Both Ways" ). Recently, though, I've started to worry about something else: the full Webification of widely deployed applications. In the past, Webification was an easy way to add a form to an HR application for employee self-service. This occasional use scales out to any employee and fits well with a Webification approach. But other, more feature-rich applications may not fare as well when Webified. Developers are increasingly tempted to do more than task-specific enablement via HTML/HTTP. What were once thin single-function forms-based Web GUI clients now are increasingly structured GUIs meant to mimic full application functionality. As this continues, the applications will only get fatter. E-Mail's Webbed Feat What's happenin g in the e-mail arena is an indication of problems to come. Vendors like Microsoft, Novell, Netscape and Lotus are simplifying their client strategies for e-mail into three paradigms: First, there's the fat proprietary client that offers full application functionality (shared folders, calendar/scheduling and other groupware) and is particularly valuable to mobile users. Second is the fat Internet standard client. This is based on POP3/IMAP4, LDAP and SMTP/MIME, and offers increasingly robust, but primarily e-mail-centric application functionality. And third is the thin Web interface client. This option offers full application functionality, no required client footprint (appropriate for roaming users who don't carry a laptop) and online operation only. Of these three, the Web GUI client has me worried. Downloading something as large as a word processing or full function e-mail client (Java-based fat Internet standard client) will be problematic enough with or without client persistence and intermediate cach ing or push delivery infrastructure (see "The Web: Dumb Terminal and Dumber File Server" ). And if instead of this, the applications are built up from HTML or simpler Java-based GUI, we'll only be faced with a different set of problems.

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