WHY WE BUILT IT AND WHY IT MATTERS

Since the web application paradigm shift of the mid 1990's, the range of web application frameworks available to the developer has grown significantly. Likewise, the techniques these frameworks use to address the challenges of web development have become more creative. Often, the steps taken have been evolutionary, meaning they build on the design approaches of prior frameworks, sometimes blending two previously separate approaches, other times adding extra features to an existing approach. In the end, the goal of every good web application framework is to simplify the development process and in turn allow the programmers to focus on actual application code, rather than fighting the same web development battles again and again.

Unfortunately, while many strides have been made, it's common place to hear about the difficulties of working with a modern web application framework. With every new framework that comes out, more layers of complexity are added to address the increasing demands placed on web applications. With more layers, there are more moving parts and as a result, greater difficulty in getting everything to work correctly together. So effectively, it could be said that while modern web application frameworks address many of the issues with web development, they increase the complexity and time required to build a web application.

Additionally, once you get comfortable working with a framework, you'll often find that although the framework offers a solution to your problem, it is less-than optimal due to the underlying limitations of the web's core architectural components, HTML & HTTP. In the worst cases, the framework offers no solution, forcing the development team to rework and degrade a planned application feature. Occasionally, you can work around the issue by injecting HTML fragments or writing tricky client-side JavaScript, but few have enough experience with such an approach to pull it off effectively within the time frame allotted. The bottom-line is that most web applications end up being less than what they should be due to the complexity of modern frameworks and the fragile foundation of the web on which they were built.

ThinWire® takes a completely new and refreshing approach to the problem. The first thing ThinWire® does is accept that HTML & HTTP were designed to deliver static content pages in the form that we see on news and magazine web sites. They are not intended to be used as is, for business process data centric application development. Sure, you've got basic data capture capability using HTML forms and that's great for filling out an order form or sending an email or two. However, when you're talking about your typical business process application, there are often complex business rules driving data entry. Further, it's necessary to have more expressive user interface elements in order to accurately capture and report information to the user.

While many of the Ajax techniques that have become popular as of recent address aspects of these problems, the issue with all of them is that they simply add another layer of complexity to an already over-burdened approach to web application programming. ThinWire® may not be perfect, but it's a clean and simple approach to solving these issues, which offers a compelling alternative to current practices. Keep visiting our site in the coming weeks to be one of the first to try it when it becomes available.