Catching Up On the Server Side
Fattening the Browser
Fat and Rich—Furthering the Lead
The Microsoft Mobility Mission
Forms, Clients, and Developer Kudos
End-User Productivity Really Does Matter
James Governor
September 24, 2002
There are a few other firms that deserve a mention in the context of richer clients—notably Curl and Macromedia. Curl has an intriguing widget plug-in approach to client-side persistence that is currently gaining some customer acceptance. A couple of recent wins such as a deployment at Siemens in Germany are helping to give Curl credibility. But the firm is really too small to build a broad rich-client ecosystem on its own.
Macromedia, meanwhile, offers the tools to build rich clients, having integrated its toolsets with those of its Allaire acquisition. But most Macromedia developers are Web designers first and developers second, and it shows. Too much Flash animation is gimmicky; it's often used to visually impress, doing nothing to improve the user experience. This negatively affects IT's perceptions of the Macromedia technology and its potential. To help overcome this perception Macromedia has done a deal with Nielsen Norman Group—the outspoken usability specialist firm that has criticized Flash so often in the past—to create best practices for UI that might help prevent Flash abuse.
Macromedia has built out an entire client-side infrastructure for building UIs—Macromedia MX—with buttons, pop-ups, stateful connections to Java-based back-end servers, local persistence for improved user experiences, and so on. These UIs download fast too, unlike some of the extravagant Flash intros out there.
Macromedia's poster child is iHotelier OneScreen, an app which allows the entire hotel reservation process to be carried out in one (very high-function) screen, rather than using the usual browser-page metaphor. Initially built for a hotel called The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs,1 this neat rich-client app nicely showcases Macromedia's argument that rich clients are a customer relationship management issue. The company claims Broadmoor reservations increased significantly after the app was installed, with very few users now dropping off the site. The app also demonstrates that browser-based clients can be rich and interactive, with the right plug-ins.
However the problem remains that neither business users nor ISVs yet take Macromedia seriously as a provider of architecture for business applications. However Macromedia does have some natural advantages. Coverage is one; according to Macromedia, more than 90% of PCs have Flash installed. For another thing, Flash client runs on devices other than PCs, such as Web phones. Business acceptance and credibility could change overnight if a Sun or an IBM bought Macromedia, but until such time it is primarily a rich media—rather than rich client—company.
Macromedia is sensibly positioning its tools as extensions to existing environments rather than replacements. Earlier this month it introduced the ColdFusion MX for the J2EE Application Servers product line, priced at $3,399 per processor, with versions available for IBM WebSphere and Sun ONE Application Server, and with another version for BEA in the pipeline.
Other market entrants creating architectures for lightweight executables include Altio, Esual Software, and Droplets. In the long run though it will be the IBMs and Oracles of the world that determine which richer-client-widget architectures actually become widely adopted in the enterprise. Customer organizations in this economy will take their technical lead from stable vendor partners; in the meantime however they will make strategic investments in these new vendors technology by way of tactical deployments. Thus Paris-based Esual clients include Audi, Hennessy Cognac, Volkswagen, and Xerox. We stress these are mostly tactical as opposed to strategic commitments—Siemens, for example, is a customer of both Curl and Esual.
1. https://www.enteryourinformation.com/broadmoor/onescreen.cfm
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