Business Applications

The goals of business application development at Wavepage are quite simple: to create solutions that provide a rapid return on investment; to save time by making heavy workloads lighter; to design systems so they can snap together with future projects. In short - INCREASE PROFITS, SAVE TIME & FUTURE PROOF.

Examples of business applications that Wavepage can write for you:

• Desktop (stand alone) e.g. senior management admin tools
• Peer to Peer e.g. for sales team
• Client Server e.g. purchasing system

User interface considerations (see 'A word about forms' below):

• Windows forms best for: rich user interface and graphics; enhanced security; more powerful development environment; quicker development time; internal use where platform and device known and users are company personnel; N.B. essential for applications requiring stand alone functionality
• Web pages best for: lightweight download; broad reach where you can't guarantee end user's device; software installation is not practical; external use where users are not company personnel

Tips:

• Get Wavepage to architect your solution right from the word go
• Check out Wavepage's list of options for ideas.

A word about forms:

In programming, we tend to talk about the graphical user interface as a collection of forms – tangible screens a user can see and use to carry out essential tasks on a computer. So we have forms for displaying documents, forms for data entry, forms for editing our files or graphics – forms for doing just about every kind of thing. First of all we had DOS forms, then Windows forms came along, and latterly the hugely popular point and click hyperlinked documents and images that make up the web pages of the Internet today.

It's a deception though, Internet browsers were never designed to host software applications. They were designed to run documents and graphics. In many respects, Internet programming is a big step backward compared to the rich, responsive interface presented by Windows. Further, there's one thing a web page can’t do unless your machine is configured as a web server, and that is process tasks when you're not connected to the Internet or your company's intranet. That makes web applications pretty well useless for stand alone work.

Of course, as time goes by, things gets blurred. It's been possible to mix and match web forms with Windows applications for some time, it's pretty easy to build a web browser into a Windows application. Although 2 email programs sitting on separate machines manage an aspect of the web between them (the sending and receiving of emails) and may themselves be Windows forms, it's difficult to imagine anything other than web pages as being 'our way of handling the Internet'.

This is completely untrue, and the latest Windows forms, whilst offering very rich functionality, allow us to build powerful applications that 'speak the web' – applications that can transfer information and data through existing Internet channels, but use a new standard called eXtensible Markup Language (XML) behind the scenes. One of the biggest obstacles facing the use of Windows forms (and hence applications) is that they have needed a large and complex installation, usually via a floppy disk set or CD – totally impractical for the web. Now it's possible to separate Windows forms from the rest of the application, 'trickle download' them as they are needed just as you would a web page (so they are just copied across and are not installed). These forms can connect to remote software just as web pages do, yet they can use the local Windows operating system to do the processing.

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Last Modified: 17 January 2008