Standalone app vs Intranet app

[Sathish K VGiri]

Hi!

I am looking for some good reasons as to why one should go for an n-tier stand-alone application(Swing/RMI/EJB/DB) when he can get away with (jsps/html/http/servlets/EJB/DB)

Scalability,Security,Client-intensive, Development effort.........

what are the decisive factors??

Greatly appreciate your thoughts....

[Stan James]

User experience is the main thing I come up with. You can make a pretty darned rich Swing UI that's extremely difficult to reproduce in HTML and JavaScript.

The bad news is many of those other factors tend to favor web apps - zero deployment (ok, near-zero), scalability may be better because of pooled database and other resource connections, horizontal scalability, portability to any platform with a browser, and so on.

What's the app about? Given a complex interface and large amounts of "state" data, a Swing client might win out after all.

[Jessica Sant]

I think a lot depends on the application's purpose and usage.

Is there a need for a central DB / repository? if not -- there's not much need for a centrally hosted system.
Does the application need to be used offline? if not -- then developing the system as a web app may be suitable
What about the functional speed of the app? typically there's a delay between pages of a web application.

Developing the UI of a web application is significantly easier than a Swing app, but then again, you're much more limited as to what kind of UI you can develop.

In a nutshell. This isn't a cut and dry question, it depends on a lot of factors.

[Jeroen Wenting]

Another argument in favour of a Swing application as compared to a browserbased solution can be CPU load.
If the application needs to perform heavy calculations you may want to move those from the server to the client at least in part. A web application cannot do that, a traditional client/server model is perfect for such situations.

If access to the client computer is needed (printers, other hardware) it's also far more difficult (if not impossible) to use a web interface.