Mark,
This is the typical discussion that I have seen many times in this and other forums. It seems that most people believe that a Swing front-end is necessary for intranet users.
I personally believe this is non-sense, and I have asked for other opinions in this forum but I didn't get any replies.
Nonetheless, the main arguments in favour of having a Swing front-end are:
1) They understand that the an 'application' implies a Swing front-end
2) They believe that a Swing front-end will give a cut of half the performance of internet users.
As I have said, I don't believe any of the above points is true.
If anyone knows any other point in favour of Swing front-end please share! First of all, more and more 'applications' are starting to be developed in Web front-end, in direct competition to Swing. The benefit of this approach is that you only need a front-end for both internet and intranet users, thus reducing development cost, and increasing maintenance and extensibility. In fact, Sun has recognised this and is working hard on a Web API for screen design called JavaServer Faces.
I doubt that the performance of a swing front-end is much better than a pre-compiled
JSP retrieved from an intranet. The only difference is that with Swing you will by-pass the Web servers containing static HTML. However I don't think that by-passing the Web servers is going to give you much performance
boost, as the real bottleneck where most of the processing power is needed is in your application servers and database.
The truth is that Swing front-end has never gained momentum. My impression is that they are buggy, slow and hard to maintain. The only benefit of Swing over HTML front-end is drag-and-drop, which is rarely needed.
Anyway, that's my opinion and I am looking forward to hear from others.
Eduard