Why not be rich and thin?
by Peter Coffee on January 29, 2007 at 10:13 AM
I've really enjoyed many chats with Sun's 
Jonathan Schwartz, but he seems to think that "rich" is the opposite of "thin." I see no reason not to be both.
Jonathan asserts, "Browsers require operating systems and windowing environments. Not exactly thin." I'd argue that the opposite of "thin" is "fat" -- and that an operating system and a windowing environment aren't fat, but muscle.
A fat client wastes energy in carrying redundant or inconsistent local copies of what should be shared and coherent data. A fat client is afflicted by the dueling side effects of installing multiple fat applications, each with its own ideas of how it wants to redefine the client environment's behavior. A fat client has more trouble getting started every morning, as it builds up arterial deposits of startup services and helper applications. Fat clients have less fun.
I don't accept Jonathan's proposed gross measure of "girth of state" as defining the quality of a client, any more than I'd accept a person's waist size as a measure of physical strength. Buying cheap hardware to run a strong operating system and a rich interactive environment seems to me like good economics: using those resources to run a thin client, one that only carries as much state as it needs to do what it's doing at the moment, seems like common sense.
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Comments
Posted by Barton Matthews on January 29, 2007 07:34 PM:
I think his point was that the definition of thin is up to the distributor of the underlying platform - what comes in Windows or Firefox, for example, can be leveraged by others. If it's not available, they have to distribute it. Thus, their app somehow becomes fat. Which is illogical. That confers all the power to define fat vs. thin on the original distributor. Thus, Microsoft.
Following the analog, are you suggesting I use the new Windows Live for sales force automation, because it comes default in Windows, and I don't have to use any of Salesforce's "fat AJAX" client functionality. Is that what you want me to do?
Posted by Peter Coffee on January 29, 2007 08:01 PM:
I'm taking the position that "fat" versus "thin" is an application model, not a measure of hardware footprint: that the amount of state that has to be created and maintained on the client, even when the application isn't in active use, is its "fatness."
Whether the run-time environment is included with the platform by default, or not, doesn't seem nearly as important in terms of the life-cycle cost of the service that the application provides.
As for competitive comparison of salesforce.com offerings versus others, I'd prefer to do that somewhere else: I'm trying to make "The Developing World" a developer issues forum, not a stage for salesforce.com marketing. I'm counting on you all to brush me back if I crowd the plate.