Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

There can be little doubt that the major desktop software innovation of the last decade-and-a-half has been the web browser. The web has helped to create far more powerful tools for user interface designers, allowing them to create much better – and, in some cases, much worse – user interfaces. And, these days, we’re all so familiar with the browser, the metaphors of ‘back and forward’ navigation, the look-and-feel of websites, that it makes perfect sense for new applications to be developed around the technology of the browser.

Finding the best means of achieving this – of leveraging web technologies in desktop business applications – hasn’t always been easy. We want powerful web applications that can access the local file system, network file shares, printers and other devices. But there are also security concerns whenever any browser technology is used – the potential for dangerous scripts to be downloaded from the web makes IT managers rightly nervous.

Adobe AIR is one well-established attempted at solving these problems, and it’s something that we’re using at PRWD to deliver business applications for our clients.

From an application development perspective, AIR is a great tool to work with. The most important advantage is the fact that I can build the application using standard web technologies – HTML, CSS, JavaScript – and yet also have access to extra features and functionality that would normally only be available to applications developed for .NET or Java. This makes it easy to implement clean, functional user interfaces which are familiar and reassuring to end-users. It’s possible to take advantage of 15 years of best practice in web design, layout and interactivity when building a desktop application.

As an example, here’s one of the screens from a web application that we are building at the moment:

It’s a simple HTML interface, clean and easy to use.

Even better for developers is the fact that you can easily access back-end systems using AJAX. In the application shown above, the interface is almost entirely powered by JavaScript running in the browser, but data is also frequently exchanged with the server in the background. With some common sense in the use of REST architecture, this provides a responsive application for the user, as well as ensuring that it’s as easy as possible to add new features to the front end. This makes the separation between data, logic and presentation much clearer than in typical web applications, a fact which tends to make quality control and testing much easier.

For future business systems this kind of approach, based on open protocols and ubiquitous technologies, will be essential. The use of principles such as REST and data formats such as XML and JSON mean that it will be possible to build a wide range of components which access the back-end service, including other enterprise services, as well as a multitude of client applications which may include mobile devices as well as desktop applications.

Tags: adobe AIR, applications, business systems