The big architectural argument: DevCT 2.0 and Avalon?!

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 21:33:45 GMT

Today, I met my best friend, Kiarash, who is also my best business partner. He's a pro in building Web user interfaces. As you may know, DevCT project involved ideas from me and him. He primarily designs UI elements and writes client-side code and I'm in charge of building the server side platform, which consists of designing database, writing ASP.NET code and the underlying infrastructure which the application runs on. In fact I believe that in a computerized solution (especially in Web) the most important thing is the presentation layer. This is what the users see at first glance, and an application with a poor UI will hardly become a success. In Web, a poorly designed application is supposed to fail. Of course, the back-end IS important because it is the thing that makes the application work, but even if an application doesn't do a job, it could attract the user just because of the user interface (well, interface to nothing!) I had many personal experiences about situations like this! Well, this was a preface of what I'm going to talk about!

Today, we discussed about writing the second release of DevCT in Avalon (Well, now it's Windows Presentation Foundation, but I love Avalon! what the hell is WPF?)

In fact, Kiarash insists on writing it in Avalon, and I disagree. Well I do like Avalon, but I think it's not designed specifically for Web. I don't say that we shouldn't use Avalon for the Web. I said if we want to write it using Avalon, we should also provide an alternative in HTML for unsupported platforms, which is a time-consuming process. Kiarash disagrees. Conversation (Not actual words used!):

- Kiarash: Vista's gonna be released with .NET Framework 3.0. It's available with Windows XP too, so Windows XP users can install it. Microsoft has invested on it so much and many applications will use it, so everyone will have it.

- Mehrdad: Well, I don't think it will be that popular at the time of release, but about six months to 1 year later. You understand low-bandwidth connections problem well, so not everyone is gonna download it to visit the Web site. And after all, I believe Web, even with improvements such as AJAX, is still designed to be a thin client platform. In fact, the value of Web is that everyone can use it with a simple Web browser. If we wanted audiences tied to a single platform (no matter how popular the platform is), we would have built a Windows-based application! So, if we build it in Avalon, how can a user with Firefox, or someone running Linux or Mac OS visit the Web site

- Kiarash (Angry): ...[censored]. Everyone should use Windows Vista. If a user doesn't use Windows, he/she'd better not to browse DevCT! ...[censored]

[silence]

Let us know what you think we should do! Who do you think is right?

Mehrdad's space: Projects

The big architectural argument: DevCT 2.0 and Avalon?!