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Web Application Solutions: A Designer’s Guide~As the Web continues to extend its reach into our daily lives, an increasing number of our
interactions will happen online. The practical implication of this for interface designers is lots
of Web application projects that cover everything from filing taxes to sharing photos.
“The fundamental purpose of Web applications is to facilitate the completion of one or more
tasks” [Bob Baxley 1]. But depending on the type and complexity of the tasks involved,
different technical solutions may be better suited to enable the specific interactions each
product requires. Flash, Java applets, DHTML, Active X, Smart Clients, Java Web Start,
SVG— what do you choose and why? What types of interactivity and visual presentation
does each technology enable? What does each limit?
As Web application interface designers, these are questions we encounter time and time
again. As a result, we decided to document what we’ve learned and research what we didn’t know about the opportunities and limitations that characterize some of the most popular Web application presentation layer solutions available today. We evaluated each solutionagainst a consistent set of criteria and described it with a concise definition, set of examples, and references that enable further analysis. We also shared our findings with a team of expert reviewers (page 18) to ensure we were on the right track. The end result is this designer’s guide.

For your convenience, each solution we’ve evaluated is presented on a single-page
snapshot that helps designers, product managers, and business owners make an informed
decision for their Web application’s front-end technology. Of course, this guide is not meant to be a substitute for consulting with knowledgeable programmers and system architects.

We simply want to prepare you for those discussions.

The right Web application presentation layer needs to meet your specific business, user,
and technology needs and multiple solutions can exist per business and per product. We
hope this guide helps steer you in the right direction…….

Web Application (Web-based application)
Web applications are Web-accessible (deployed and/or accessed through a Web browser)
Web-connected (utilize a http connection for information retrieval or display), and
task-oriented (beyond the simple browsing of information) software.
Due to the variance and subjectivity inherent in defining types of Web applications, we’ve
established a continuum from thin client to rich client on which each Web application solution
can be plotted. Many solutions (and their various implementations) have characteristics of
more than one group. For example, DHTML with XMLhttpRequest (commonly referred to as
AJAX) is part thin client and part Rich Internet Application (RIA). Likewise, some desktop
applications really straddle the line between Rich Internet Application and rich client (a.k.a. athick client).

Lastly, while you could think of any Internet-enabled desktop application (like Apple’s iTunes
or Yahoo’s Instant Messenger) as a Rich Internet Application, we’ve left this type of software
out of the discussion. Applications that require a traditional client-side install process
(regardless whether or not the install file can be downloaded from a Web server) are not
evaluated within this guide….

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