Re: web-based application or desktop application?

[allolex]

Web-based applications have an advantage which has been touched upon here: many programmers already have the necessary skills to create a web interface. Nowadays, most (I don't think I'm going out on a limb here) people come to programming after having messed with DHTML for a while and discovering they can't do what they want with HTML/CSS/JS alone. It seems like a natural extension of the learning process to do a web-based GUI.

In my own experience, the web-based path has been the only way to go because many of the people working on our dictionary project have no means of installing software on their systems and are too far away to receive much hands-on support at all. Plus, they can use a familiar tool like a browser to do their work.

The advantage for us, the developers, is that when we make a change, the deployment is immediate.

There's not much here that hasn't been said by others, but since you asked for personal experience, you got it.

[exussum0]

For SIMPLE apps.. really simple ones. For anything that like, takes an excel file and flattens it to csv, then processes the data and mails it out.. those are skills that you need just as much as learning to build a page. Learning java or tk isn't hard either. problem w/ pages, or the advantage, is everyone's code is out in the open.