What is there in Smart Client that Webclient cannot do?

[maria]

Hi all,
I was looking for a recent topic pointing out things that Webclient cannot do as opposed to Smart Client and haven't found one (please share the link if I'm mistaken).
It'd be good to have this sort of things in one topic for everyone to not have to rummage through the whole forum.

So. Is there anything in Webclient that cannot be done compared to Smart Client?
We have to make a decision and continue to develop either of these (I know that Servoy advertises its solutions as being able to run in both but experience proves that it's much more work than it seems at a first glance).

Cheers,
Maria

[Jan Aleman]

Pro's of Smart Client:
- Full access to filesystem
- Access to locally installed software
- Access to local hardware
- Direct access to printers
- Possibility to use local java classes, beans and applets
- More advanced GUI capabilities
Pro's of Web Client:
- Does not need Java on local client
- Launches faster
- Runs on mobile devices such as smartphones, iPad, etc

My recommendations:
- If you are a larger company and go SaaS do both
- If your users need occassional access to the app (get in do some work, get on) web client is better
- If your users 'live' in the app, ie they open it in the morning and use it througout the day, the smart client is best choice
- If you develop for web client it is less work to make it work and look the same in smart client than vice versa

[pbakker]

You can also look at the documentation: http://wiki.servoy.com/display/DOCS/Web ... y+overview

Paul

[lwjwillemsen]

Hi Jan,

I see after some browsing / googling that there are browser plug-ins available to access local hardware such as a serial port.

I was living some time now with the (Servoy) idea that accessing local hardware is not possible from within a (any) webclient.
Last week I discussed the pro and cons of web and smart with a software developer colleague / competitor (not Servoy) who looked very surprised when I told him local access is not possible from any webclient...

In discussions with Servoyans in the past I understood that local access was prohibited / not possible due to the design / nature of a browser in general...

Update the info ?

Regards,

[pbakker]

Hi Lambert,

From within a webpage/Javascript (by default) it is not possible to access local hardware and/or the local filesystem.

Using browser specific plugins you could lift that restriction, but at the cost of:
- Security breaches
- Loss of zero deployment model
- Deployment issues like versioning of the plugin, security restrictions stopping the installation of the plugin etc etc.
- Building custom plugins for every browser you'd like to support

You could also choose for a more widespread browser plugin like Flash, Java Applet of Silverlight, but each of these come with their own set "issues", besides the fact that they are not universally supported in every browser nowadays.

All in all, using browser plugins to gain access to the local hardware of the machine where the browser runs is a troublesome road to follow.

Good thing is that in HTML5 more API is added to the browsers JavaScript, so one day, when the majority of the browsers support that.....

Paul

[lwjwillemsen]

Hi Paul,

Thanks a lot for this extra insight...

Like always it's a matter of standardisation and security (-issues)

Regards,