The next wave for application development

The first applications were only run on large mainframes with a limited number of users normally running batch processing. This was then replaced with the introduction of personal computers and the development of applications to run on these operating on local files. Soon applications were started to be developed that still ran locally but accessed remote databases and networked file repositories. From here we have now a trend in the development of web-based clients (eg. HTML in a browser) to deliver applications to the user, otherwise known as thin clients.

More and more you are seeing applications being developed using thin clients as the user interfaces, however there are many issues with the use of thin clients to provide dynamic or interactive applications for users. Now there is a new trend gathering momentum to use XML-based rich clients to develop applications.

Coach Wei has produced a short article on the Computerworld about XML Rich clients and this new trend.

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