Remembering days when client-server rules the world, then days when everybody praised light web clients where all user interface (UI) was prepared on web server and any user action was communicated back to server (this could lead to heavy network traffic – I’ve seen one mainstream ERP  program, where a change in one input, say line item quantity,  lead to several megabytes being sent over network).  I’m quite amused to see how we’re returning back to thick clients and passing  more and more UI tasks back to user devices.   This probably make sense, taking into account the computing power available in user devices now (my mobile has approximately same computing power (dual core 1.2 GHz ARM CPU)  as  a reasonable  server  ten years back(Sun V240 for instance)) and  improvement of web browsers and especially their Javascript engines.   Normally utilization on an average client machine would be very low, unless client is dealing with digital media, so using  available computing  power there  is an obvious step. Network bandwidth could be now  more precious resource then client  computing cycles. Continue reading Web Clients Are Getting Thick →