Popularity of rich clients

[shawn kennedy]

Does it really make sense to use rich clients?What percentage of companies actually use them to develop software.I think developers will tend to waste more time on the look and feel of things and the presentation layer than the actual business logic.

[Romain Guy]

It's always a matter of priorities. Not taking care of the UI is always a short-term solution. In the end, the users will spend a LOT MORE combined time using the applications than the developers will spend writing it. Where's the gain here? Spend less on development and lose more on users productivity and happiness or the other way around?

Our book always presents the effect with a few ideas on how they can be used EFFECTIVELY. Visual effects are not only about looking good, they are also about making the UI better, more usable, easier to understand.

We also developed a bunch of libraries and utility classes to make effects easy to add quickly in enterprise applications; to save you guys time.

[Qunfeng Wang]

As far as I know, most of EMS(Element Management System) applications are developed as rich clients. And it's hard/impossible to get the richness with a web application.

But managers usually let junior programmers to develope the client side. They think it's much easier than the server side. I totally don't agree with these managers. A rich client application usually have more codes in client side. And it's difficult to build an application friendly to use.