Web-based desktop applications

Recently I was contacted by a friend, who has always been a web developer, about writing a small custom desktop application. He wanted to know if I could help a friend of his that needed a small application for calculating customer bonuses for a referral program.

I asked him why he did not do it himself and he told me that the person wanted a desktop application, not a web application. He went on to tell me that he had considered the possibility of writing the application using Java but it would take him too much time to learn to do a desktop application with Java. This got me thinking because this fellow has been a Java developer for at least six years (which is to say as long as I've known him) but probably longer. I've had long discussions about this subject, with lots of people that, in one way or another, are involved with Morfik and it seems to be a consensus that it is much easier for experienced developers of desktop applications to learn to code web applications, than the other way around.

As web development diverged from traditional software development the people entering the web development camp without having done traditional development have less and less notion of how an application that is build from scratch works. Most of these people have been creatin classes that get loaded by an application server or scripts that are embedded in HTML code for all their professional lives.

When considering this case it occurred to me that Morfik AppsBuilder makes the creation of a Web-based destkop application very easy. Actually, everytime you run your Morfik application from within the IDE or debug it, you are essentially running a native windows application that happens to work as a web server.

If you compile a Morfik Web Application project as standalone you get a native windows executable that will invoke the computer's default browser when executed. This means that you can just drop a link to a Morfik application on your desktop, for example, and double click it to startup the browser accessing its start page.

This characteristic can be combined with an interface such as Mozilla's Prism project, which lets you give a browser application its own window, which will allow your web application to behave even more like a desktop application.

While Morfik AppsBuilder clearly was not meant to be a desktop application development tool, it can do a pretty good job at creating an application that will run quite efectively and look very good while doing so.