Programming Microsoft Web Forms (Pro Developer)
ISBN: 0735621799
EAN: 2147483647
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 70
Pages: 70
Authors: Douglas J. Reilly
As I have mentioned, and as I will continue to emphasize in this chapter, developers who want to create great Web Forms applications face real challenges. So a reasonable question might be, why bother?
A Web Forms application can be reached from anywhere, on virtually any device. I often use my Pocket PC Phone Edition to check the Web from wherever I am. For instance, I was recently at a minor league baseball game where I saw a friend wearing a blue wristband. I am familiar with yellow wristbands (LIVESTRONG cancer survivorship) and pink wristbands (breast cancer awareness), but I was unfamiliar with the meaning of a blue wristband. I was able to quickly check the Web and determine that a blue wristband represents autism awareness.
When you are creating an application for a small number of users, how the application is deployed is not a major concern. When you are creating an application for use by dozens or even hundreds of users, how the application is deployed becomes a much greater concern. The last major non-Web application I developed was a document management system for a major health care system. The application had to be deployed on a couple of machines on every nursing unit in one of the hospitals. It was a very difficult deployment because the PCs in the hospital system were not entirely standard. Each machine installation presented new and different challenges; changes to any PC, such as installing service packs or other applications, could cause problems for the application.
On the other hand, I also created a Web Forms application that was used by three hospitals in the same hospital system. Initially, the application was used by a dozen or so users at each hospital. During an emergency, the application had to be used by over 50 users at one of the facilities. The "deployment" of the Web Forms application was as simple as e-mailing a link to the application to the additional users who needed access.
Web Forms applications look like the Web pages that most of your users are already familiar with. If your users can use eBay and Amazon.com, they can probably use your application with minimal training.
The load placed, per user, on server resources for Web Forms applications is generally less than the load placed on a traditional client-server application. A client-server application generally keeps the client and server connected for the life of the application. A Web Forms application connects with the client computer only when the user submits a form. Also, the power of the client computer accessing a Web Forms application is not as important as it is in a client-server application scenario. The client PC needs only to run the browser; virtually all the code runs on the Web server. Client-side JavaScript is the one exception, and generally that code does not involve a great deal of processing.