The Advantages of Mounting Applications on the Web
The many advantages of mounting applications on the Web center around the concepts of accessibility and ease of use. Using the Internet as a medium for deploying your applications frees you from many of the stressful considerations that developers of operating system-specific applications have to contend with. Deciding on how to deploy an application can be difficult, but learning about these advantages can help you decide if Web deployment is right for you.
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Accessibility
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By mounting your applications to the Web, you are ensuring that as many people as possible can access your content. People use many different operating systems. Some are substantially more popular than others, but there is always a group of potential users that you cannot reach if you program only for those. Because the technologies that you can use to create Web applications are designed to work on practically all operating systems, all Internet users will be able to access them.
Interface Standardization
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If you create an application for one operating system, and then want to port it over to another, you may run into problems when you try to make their interfaces look exactly the same. This can be due to the way a given operating system renders graphics, or because it puts the same skin over all interfaces. For instance, in Windows, the "minimize" icon is a horizontal bar, and on Macs, it is a yellow circle. Mounting an application to the Web ensures that the interface will remain consistent across operating systems.
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Around-the-Clock-Availability
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Not only are Web apps available to your users around the clock, they are available to them even if they don't have access to their home PCs. Because a Web app stores information on an individual user in a database, and not on their computer, it does not matter which device they use it from. A user can be just as comfortable using your app on a friend's computer as he is using it on his smartphone.
Easy Updates
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Conventional programs that users install to their computers are capable of checking with a database for updates, download those updates and then install them. However, drastic updates or new versions may require users to install the program all over again from a new disk. With a Web app, your users will never have to deal with this inconvenience. You can release a major overhaul of your Web app without your users having to download or install anything. One caveat to this is if your new version requires users to have a version of a supporting technology such as Flash or Java that they do not have.
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