Why choose NT6 over Remote Desktop ?

[John Fligg]

I am finding that developing in NT6 is slow taking into account learning the new paradigm, difficulty in debugging and making it all look pretty. My clients want a "Mobile" solution but are now asking why they cannot have a feature rich solution to match my traditional desktop applications. By Mobile they actually mean "will run on Android or iPad".
 
All this is leading me towards a Remote Desktop solution which does have some drawbacks over NT6, mainly in the server required to run it. But the advantages are we develop a traditional Clarion application and the end user gets the feature rich solution they want. This dramatically reduces our development time.

Of course the more you develop in NT6 the more fluent you get as the learning curve diminishes. However I spend 99% of my time developing in C6/C8 so every time I go back to NT6 I have to start the learning curve again. Of course that's my fault not NT6.
 
So with every respect to Bruce and his team, and acknowledging the technical achievement they have come up with, what actually is the advantage of NT6 over a Remote Desktop solution or does it really just boil down to developer preference based on what the market wants?

[Bruce]

The primary difference between the two are twofold;

a) Scalability. The web scales up better than RPD. Primarily this is because the amount of resources per user goes up faster in RDP then when on the web.

b) "Reach" - by which I mean that pretty much every device has a browser (well every device that could run an RDP client has a browser) and there's nothing for the user to do - they just point their browser at the site and away they go. RDP on the other hand has to be installed on each device, so the user can only used "pre configured" devices to access your servers.

I suppose an ancillary part is that the Web has _limited_ access to the hardware, but it does have some access. A web page can save data locally (although NT6 does not do this) and has access to the GPS. In the future you may see more of the hardware being exposed to HTML (like the camera) but there's no guarantee of this.

RDP though has, as far as I know, no access to the hardware layer at all. It's simply a portal to another machine. Whether there will be developments in this area I don't know.

Some ancillary issues;
Screen-size. Windows apps tend to be designed for fairly large resolutions, and tend to be optimized for mouse input. and they don't really lend themselves terribly well to "no right click" and "big stubby fingers" for input. It's do-able, but you need to allow for that market when building your app. It's a lot easier to do responsive design on a web page because the web is designed for screens of all sizes - and of course really small interfaces for phones become possible.

Development effort and cost is obviously a factor. It takes more work, and more effort, to create a native web app rather than just putting a windows app on a server. If your market is small it can be hard to recoup the cost of that development.

There are pro's and con's to both approaches, so ultimately it's up to you which one you choose.

Cheers
Bruce

[Bruce]

some other things to consider;

a) price. You need to get "Client access licenses" on the server side to match the number of clients that you will support at one time. Usually this is quite expensive.

b) speed. RDP is a lot slower than HTML - especially over slower connections.

c) configuration - the server needs to be configured to allow access on a "per user" basis - ie no casual visitors.

d) security - RDP gives you access to the whole desktop, so you need to configure the actual windows box very carefully to prevent rogue users from hacking the server.

Cheers
Bruce

[John Fligg]

Bruce - just two comments.

You say RDP has to be installed on each device. Is that correct? I understand (and have seen it in action) that the client is given a small RDP "shortcut" which then handles all the connection as I understand it. iPads have free "apps" that allow them to use RDP. There is no actually installation of RDP on the clients device. Android for example work right out of the box.

I am also not convinced the touchscreen issue is that valid but I do see where you are coming from. Some of my web app has tiny buttons (especially smartphone support) that make it unusable. Maybe I am different but I am now designing all my apps (desktop/mobile) to run on Windows 8 and have touchscreen ability. That means big buttons.

I certainly don't want to seem as if I am trying to come down on one side or the other but just felt these 2 issues were not quite correct. I do take all your other points.

John

[Bruce]

Hi John,

>> iPads have free "apps" that allow them to use RDP. There is no actually installation of RDP on the clients device. Android for example work right out of the box.

it varies from device to device. Some have an RDP app pre-installed, some have to download and run an app. My point I guess is that there's some prep work to be done on (at least some of) the devices.

>> I am also not convinced the touchscreen issue is that valid but I do see where you are coming from.

It'll obviously depend on your app.

Cheers
Bruce