The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

(Real) Web Applications

A Colleague just asked me for some examples of real web applications. Applications with relatively complex user interfaces as you might find in a traditional desktop app.

As opposed to the three textareas and a checkbox submit form.

I found it quite hard to find examples of public websites that have well designed non trivial interfaces.

The best example I could show was the demo of the smooth webmail client at www.atmail.com.

I know that most of the real applications that have been ported or built for the web are internal and not available to use as illustrations.

Can anyone give me any urls to websites that show what can be done with the web.

Thanks

braid_ged
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Troll!

Ron
Thursday, March 18, 2004

if this is real (i recognize your user name), i think modernbill looks pretty swift.
http://www.modernbill.com/demo/index.htm

josheli
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Ron,

You're a loud fool.

braid_ged
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Thanks josheli that is just the sort of thing I was looking for.

Any other examples are welcome people.

braid_ged
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Not a full app, but if you are using IE http://www.janusys.com uses a full Win32 style menu system and a treeview system. Their support boards use their new ASP.NET datagrid which is pretty advanced. The recent redesign of http://www.msn.com also uses some pretty nice DHTML within IE. MSN downgrades nicely in other browsers whereas Janus' site doesn't at all.

Just a couple off of the top of my head.

--Josh

JWA
Thursday, March 18, 2004

JWA,

Thanks a lot for that Janusys site, its very nice, I guess it has to be since they sell asp.net controls :)

Pity I am more a php man.

Thanks for the link, the sort of thing my co-worked wanted.

braid_ged
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Outlook Web Access...

John C.
Thursday, March 18, 2004

phpMyAdmin, there is a demo here: http://www.phpmyadmin.net/phpMyAdmin/ it's a web interface to MySQL to look after it

Matthew Lock
Thursday, March 18, 2004

The bank I use (HSBC in Hong Kong) seems to have a fairly sophisticated web front-end. The only problem is (for you) that you have to log-in to use it.

Does your bank offer something similar?

David

David Freeman
Thursday, March 18, 2004

eRoom (now owned by documentum) is a fairly sophisticated product. Go to http://www.documentum.com/solutions/collaboration/collaboration_tour.html and launch the Flash tour. There's plenty of screen shots. (For the record, I worked at a place that used version 6, and it was a real pain in the ass to work with.)

Also, do IE plug-ins count? I've seen several web apps deployed as plug-ins that were as nice as desktop apps (well, almost).

Nick
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Ah, public is difficult. My ISP's email web interface is really nifty, but then you'd need my login details to see.

Plenty of CRM systems e.g. Siebel have pretty non-trivial frontends. (And most work only in IE as far as I can tell; htas etc)

i like i
Thursday, March 18, 2004

I've been working with Eastpro http://www.eastpro.com.hk/ as a client for nearly 2 years. They have a sophisticated crm and financial planning system, amongst others.
David

David Freeman
Thursday, March 18, 2004

http://www.oddpost.com/

Just me (Sir to you)
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Any enterprise-grade CMS. Many (probably most) will let you in for a free demo.

Egor Shipovalov
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Fogbugz

Or any number of other help-desk and bug-tracking apps.

Bugzilla

Ward
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Internet banking.

http://www.salesforce.com/

http://services.newsgator.com/

Ben R
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Also...
http://www.vertigosoftware.com/Clients_LifeScan.aspx
http://www.netiq.com/products/wrs/default.asp

Ben R
Thursday, March 18, 2004

I guess you don't look for client-side controls, but anyway:
http://www.cult3d.com/gallery/conceptcar/car.asp

doesn't_really_matter
Thursday, March 18, 2004

http://www.activeui.net (client-side grid control)

nemoi
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Bricolage is an industrial strength content management system and has a really sharp interface: http://bricolage.cc/

Chris Winters
Thursday, March 18, 2004

The Janus site is cute, but it immediately is eliminated as a serious web application when I realized that it doesn't work properly in Mozilla (tested with Firebird 0.7), with no usable fallback.

.
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Thanks all, many great links

braid_ged
Thursday, March 18, 2004

I am amazed at how people will write stuff that ONLY work in IE and think they've created a web application. They haven't. They've created an ANTI web application. Honestly, you think people on this forum would know better.

Me
Thursday, March 18, 2004

"I am amazed at how people will write stuff that ONLY work in IE and think they've created a web application. They haven't. They've created an ANTI web application. Honestly, you think people on this forum would know better."

Um, I put in the link for Janus WITH a qualifier saying that it only works in IE. As I use Safari it is worthless to me, but they do have nice IE-only web controls, if you can call an IE-only control a nice web control. The poster didn't specify his needs, so IE-only may have been OK with his requirements.

--Josh

JWA
Thursday, March 18, 2004

>A Colleague just asked me for some examples of real web applications. Applications with relatively complex user interfaces as you might find in a traditional desktop app.

It's hard to do. An alternative approach is to write a "traditional" app, and sort out an easy way to deploy it. That's not very trendy at the moment, but it can be an excellent option in some cases.

I wrote an article about this on my web site, here http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/jjrusk/tech/id57.htm. It includes links to quotes such as this (from Microsoft):

"Everyone seems to be fixated on Web applications. Web applications are a great way to get the largest reach, but for more than occasional use, Web applications are a poor imitation of what's available in a richer client that Windows Forms enables"

John Rusk
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Opps, that link should be:

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/jjrusk/tech/id57.htm

(The full stop in my previous post ended up as part of the URL)

John Rusk
Thursday, March 18, 2004

Not perhaps a morally pure application but a technical tour-de-force: check out http://www.betfair.com.

Sadly however the web was not made for web applications; DHTML makes some easy things easy, most easy things difficult, and difficult things next to impossible.

XForms is potentially just great to overcome this, but I fear very much that it will be the Betamax to InfoPath's VHS.

Pythonista
Saturday, March 20, 2004

>Um, I put in the link for Janus WITH a qualifier saying that it >only works in IE.

Then it is not a web app. He asked for example web applications. I believe that this is a true and serious distinction. If an application works in only one browser I think it cannot be considered a web app. Maybe I'm wrong, you seem to think so.

Me
Wednesday, March 24, 2004